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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23620864">Bunk in the Red Part Two</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/dollarpound/pseuds/dollarpound'>dollarpound</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Community (TV), Red Dwarf (UK TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 08:29:12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>26,248</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23620864</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/dollarpound/pseuds/dollarpound</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Todhunter thought he was the bad boy of the ship.  Until he met Evil Jeff...</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Bunk in the Red Part Two</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Written two years ago</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Troy and Abed had ended up cellmates in a secret prison aboard a nanobotically reincarnated fictional mining ship in an alternative dimension.  </p><p>‘”It had been a long day and Lister was idly dozing on his bunkmate and lifepartner’s bunk after a few bevvies at Parrots,’” read Abed.</p><p>‘Lifepartner?’ interjected Troy.  ‘They’re only in for two years!’</p><p>‘No, this is fanfic, set in an alternative dimension where Rimmer and Lister don’t go to jail and are gay.’  </p><p>‘Oh,’ said Troy.</p><p>‘I thought we could learn something from it, to somehow work out how in this dimension we can change fictional history and help the show return to greatness...’</p><p>‘Oh,’ said Troy.</p><p>‘”Ace had left, presumably having other kippers to smoke, and Rimmer had promised to catch him up later, after he made one of his many obsessive drive-plate checking trips.  And now Lister was alone.  He toyed with his ismeg for a few minutes but it gave him no joy.  An internet tribe had somehow found out about Cat and Kryten, or an eccentric Welshman called Birdman had somehow found out and an enthusiastic coterie of bored mainly catering staff had begun narrating their lives to the beat of his conspiratorial logic.  They didn’t seem to know what was going on so it didn’t worry him, Lister that was. </p><p>Since they moved back into Red Dwarf, Cat and Kryten had become increasingly distant from Rimmer and Lister, with Kochanski the only liaison.  They had been arrested on their return by secret military police, administered with pyschotropic drugs and unwittingly plugged into an AR simulation.  This eccentric trial had revealed they were in fact telling the truth.  They were from 3 million years in the future and the entire crew including those holding them under investigation had popped into existence minutes before they had arrived.</p><p>The decision was made to cover the whole thing up.  Lister and Rimmer were complicit.  They had fallen in love on Starbug, Rimmer helping Lister work through his issues with Kochanski, and as Cat and Kochanski’s love burgeoned, were left with more time alone to fall deeper and deeper.  On the newly minted Dwarf they found a societal background to their relationship which they needed to settle down, provide a context for one day, a family.</p><p>Kryten and Cat were placed under house arrest in the Mimas Embassy.  That they were unregistered crew wasn’t so much the problem as that they were ontologically incompatible with how the society imagined itself.  A futuristic robot and an evolved cat.  Somehow Birdman knew.  It was a fly in his ointment.  Lister’s ointment that is.</p><p>Lister thought of Kramer, the Seinfeld character, when Rimmer appeared in the doorway, kind of righting himself as he came to a skid stop like an unbreakable ruler or a cartoon going *g-doing*.  Or maybe it was the way his erect frizzy hair was shocked and shaky.</p><p>‘Rimmer, you alright?’  asked Lister, sitting up in Rimmer’s bunk and allowing sugar puffs to tumble onto the cold steel floor.  It was weird to call your life-partner by their surname but Lister and Rimmer’s relationship was a cocoon of weirdness that had given them the first normal either of them had had in their lives.</p><p>‘Lister... is that... you?’ Rimmer meekly hesitated.</p><p>‘What happened to you, man, you were only gone ten minutes?’</p><p>‘I was ch-checking the drive plates...’</p><p>‘...when...’</p><p>‘Just now.’</p><p>‘No, I mean,’ Lister made a winding gesticulation with a limp right hand as he spoke ‘I was just checking the drive plates, when...?’</p><p>‘Nothing.  I came back.  Here I am.’  He sounded hollow.  His eyes were fixed on the one overlarge star that hung always in the same place beyond the grey hexagonal window.  It looked like... a lightbulb.</p><p>‘Rimmer!’  Lister jumped down from the bunk and swaggered sexily over sandwiching him against the doorframe.  ‘Here you are...’ he said putting his hands on his shoulders.  It was like a statue coming to life.  Rimmer’s hardlight bee could realistically simulate a human body, but human bodies always needed other human bodies to really bring them to life.</p><p>Rimmer’s eyes softened as he took in the caring, twinkly face of his love and as Lister released his shoulders and stroked down his chest and stomach, his anxiety seemed to puncture and dissipate and he became warm and soft and have give again.  He forgot everything, even the weird lightbulb star, there was only Lister.  His fingers lightly grappled the trinkets sewn into Lister’s jacket as he delicately kissed him, kind of lightly nuzzling his lips, his considerable nostrils filling with stale ash and lager, waiting for the burnt bitter notes to trigger the tipping point where he became consumed with lust before snogging Lister with increasing hunger and moisture and grabbing his butt through his soft longjohns.</p><p>Lister started unbuttoning Rimmer’s shirt, impatient for his firm naked body.  Rimmer pushed Lister’s hands away by ripping open his longjohns and pushing him back onto the bunk.  </p><p>‘Lights!’ he called and it went dark.  Even the star went out.</p><p>Lister persisted in trying to derobe Rimmer, but he had other plans, Rimmer that is, as he uses his considerable muscle to push Lister’s hands into the bed, the snogging is reaching cannibalistic proportions, like the aim is to see who can turn their head inside out the first, who is the most fervent.  But Rimmer was in charge here and he decided to move South.</p><p>The burnt bitter BO of Lister’s armpits singed Rimmer’s ample holonostrils as he explored the soft sweaty skin with his tongue, greedily licking and sucking his way around his manunderboob, the doughy generosity of his beige belly, the stubble of a regrowing treasure trail before engorging his whole face on Lister’s throbbing shining bulbous Schneiberhouser.</p><p>Because Rimmer was a hologram, he could just stretch the back of his throat like a cartoon allowing him to harness the entirety of Lister’s epic fat cock, and really get two nostrils full of bitter pubes, deliberately, fervently gagging himself on this monument, this momentous colossus.  It hurt pleasurably, filling his throat with a satisfying warmth and pressure.  A damn good mouthful of cock.  Airtight rapture.</p><p>Lister was helpless, his body became clammy and burning with desire, tiny drops of sweat condensed over the smooth surface of his body which caught the chill of the ship’s aircon.  He wanted to rip Rimmer’s clothes off and feel his muscles, what was his game?  The pleasure made him gyrate uncontrollably, making him go weak as Rimmer’s bodyweight bit into his wrists and he did press-ups on Lister’s cock.  Lister groaned and whimpered as his sweaty thighs squirmed in the eddy of curry encrusted sheets.</p><p>‘What are you doing to me?’ gasped Lister with disbelief.  When Rimmer gave him eye contact that seemed to convey cheekiness, Lister exploded into the hardlight hologram with such force and volume he became a partfullgram, his eyes creasing with exertion and exquisite pleasure, Lister that is.  He kind of juddered as Rimmer smiled up at him, cum and saliva all over his face, and collapsed into a *petite mort*.</p><p>As Rimmer dabbed and wiped with Kleenex, Lister got sucked into a secret corner of his mind, where rainslicked railings, lacquered in black paint, glinted in the harsh grey London light.  The kind of railings you get in rich parts of London, intimidating and imperial, colony-garnered flowery paisley styles rendered in Anglo-iron.  Figures pass, the men all have the same floppy hair and oversized untucked silk 90s shirts, the women tapping casual femininity, their heals puncturing the skin of smooth puddles that stare out the blank sky.  The wine bar.  Why did Lister go here so often in his reveries?  </p><p>‘C’mere let me get my hands on you, you big tease,’ said Lister, coming to and grabbing his lover with an unexpected shirt rip.</p><p>He twisted his body to see that Rimmer’s shirt was slit, and beneath it, his skin, a long fine bloodencrusted holowhip mark down his rippling back. </p><p>‘What the smeg happened?  You got holowhipped?  Who has a holowhip?’</p><p>‘No-one,’ said Rimmer glumly.  He was still crouched there, his arms exhausted from propping his body, so he just collapsed forward, resigning himself to the pillowmusk.</p><p>‘You were attacked!  Was it the garbage workers?’  Rimmer had raised the ire of Red Dwarf’s Garbage Workers’ Union by rescuing a job destroying BEGG released by Ace into the waste disposal system.</p><p>‘No,’ muffled Rimmer, exhausted.</p><p>Lister was frustrated.  ‘Who holowhipped you, Arn?’</p><p>‘It wasn’t a holowhip, it was an hallucination of a holowhip – it tricked my lightbee into thinking I was holowhipped.  A pleasure GELF.  I thought it was you.’</p><p>‘Smegging homophobes!’</p><p>‘They know not what they do.’</p><p>‘Rimmer!’</p><p>‘It’s nearly healed.’</p><p>Lister very lightly brushed the encrustations on Rimmer’s back with his finger, Rimmer flexed himself out into the bed, scabs cracked and flaked.  Lister rested his face softly on the back of Rimmer’s arm.</p><p>‘It healed,’ said Lister, talking societally ‘but now these GELFs are here to re-open the wound.’</p><p>‘Not all GELFs are homophobic.’</p><p>‘I don’t want anyone on board to be homophobic.’</p><p>‘But Lister – some people on board don’t want anyone to be gay.’</p><p>‘Well let’s get rid of them then.’</p><p>‘But we have to be tolerant.  If we’re not tolerant of them how can we expect anyone to be tolerant of us?’</p><p>‘Rimmer you can guarantee pleasure GELFs not to be tolerant of us, you know what they’re like.’</p><p>‘Don’t be racist.  Don’t you remember how you broke Kryten’s programming?  You just need to give people enough space and time.’</p><p>‘I’m not being racist!’</p><p>‘Okay, well just don’t say anything on twonker – Hollister’s clamping down on hate speech.’</p><p>‘It’s not hate speech!  I’m worried about the man I love.’</p><p>‘Well don’t.  No-one’s going to find out about this...’</p><p>‘You’re serious?  You’re not going to report it?  I’m going to report it...’</p><p>‘Lister you will do no such thing.  Wasn’t it you who kept saying don’t rock the boat, stop stirring the pot, that you just want things to be normal and nice and settled?’</p><p>‘Yeah, and you went off on one anyway and now look what’s happened!’</p><p>‘You’re saying it’s my fault for rescuing the BEGG.  You never cared about that BEGG, you’re just a cryptofacist human-supremist under all the spacepunk garb.’</p><p>Lister sat up.  ‘That hurt.’</p><p>‘Smeg,’ said Rimmer into his pillow.</p><p>‘That’s sad,’ said Troy.  ‘What do you think it means?’</p><p>‘Something about queer relationships through the prism of impending multiculturalism?’</p><p>‘Do you think it’s saying multiracial gay couples can’t make it on mining ships?’</p><p>There was a pause.  Gantries clanked, articulating the silence.  Prison extras swore and groaned semiauthentically.</p><p>A slender hand reached down from the top bunk to meet Troy’s fingertips.</p><p>‘No, Troy, I don’t...’</p><p>‘Do you think it’s our job to make Rimmer and Lister fall for each other?  Is that why we’re here?  Is it like Sam Beckett in Quantum Leap and that’s what we have to do to leap out this week?’</p><p>‘Kind of.  Do you really think we can get Rimmer and Lister together here?’</p><p>‘Well, why not, it’s all fiction right, just like that Rimmer/Lister slash you were reading...’</p><p>‘It has to be believable...  In *this* dimension Lister’s Rimmer left to be Ace to be replaced by a retrograde ‘you as you used to be’ nano-Rimmer.  In the fanfic, Ace has gone into another dimension where Rimmer *didn’t* leave, so when they returned to the nano Dwarf there was no smeghead nano Rimmer to thwart their case – they didn’t go to jail like here.  So the idea is they end up back where they started, but with all these series of adventures in common, in secret, the Cat and Kryten under house arrest...’</p><p>&lt;~k</p><p> *The world will always welcome lovers, as time... goes... byyy*  Sam concluded, turning out to be an accomplished latenight bar pianist and singer.  But only an accomplished latenight bar pianist and singer.  </p><p>‘Play it again, Sam!’ said Todhunter, turning and leaning back sloppily from his art deco bar stool, toasting the blurred colourful disco lights that swam around his head and nearly falling over backwards.</p><p>‘Really?’ said Sam.  ‘You really think, for the fifteenth time in a row?’  Todhunter’s boyfriend was now working there, and he sidled up now, he was very camp and would tend to sidle and such, and temptingly tilted the Scotch at Todhunter, because Todhunter was gruffly male and would drink Scotch and such. </p><p>‘Sorry,’ said Todhunter, raising his glass to his boyfriend barman and turning to Sam at the same time.  ‘Itsh the only request I know.’ </p><p>Todhunter was handsome and had a good body, even as he sags against the bar as he does now, his JMC shirt untucked and unbuttoned, his hair smooshed across his forehead pitifully.  So when he became aware of another like himself, leering at his pretty boy barman boyfriend in the large mirror as he leant back against the bar, sleeves arrogantly rolled up, chewing on a toothpick seedily and nursing an identical gendernormative Scotch, his arm hairs twitched competitively. </p><p>*A sigh is just a sigh...*</p><p>The handsome athletic man leaning against the bar sighed longingly into his Scotch.  Suddenly a dry ice machine started up from under Todhunter’s bar stool.</p><p>‘Oh, not that again,’ said Bob, as he mopped the bar archetypically.  Bob was latinx, had cheekbones like a shark and a pout that could put you out.  He wore some trad barman gear which included what looked like bicycle clips round his elbows for some reason.  His facial hair teased into some fractal shavemaze and if you could see beneath the bicycle clips and colonial costume his whole body was tattooed.  Whole.</p><p>‘Look,’ said Todhunter quietly into his whisky, his eyes looking up at his boyfriend, his shoulders hunched like Larry King.  ‘Even if I wanted to, Kochanski’s Bunkmate really hates me honestly...’</p><p>Bob’s eyes pinched angrily at the first part of the sentence, and he squirreled off behind the general tropicalia.  </p><p>*Jealousy and hate*</p><p>It was late, it was just Todhunter, the other handsome metrosexual guy, the pianist, and two skutters feebly trying to wield a mop.  The skutters were useless but no one ever said anything because they were kind of cute and had a strong union.  Plus some 1980s oversize inflatable popart parakeets.  The mop clattered to the ground yet again just as the dry ice geyser went off and Sam hit a bum note.</p><p>Parrots was a bar on a mining ship - it was like a bar in an airport or a shopping mall, an artifice, like you were sitting in a replica of a bar installed in an art gallery.  Molecule thin graphene walls and no windows.  Something too clinical and empty to qualify for any organic authentic consistency.</p><p>But on Red Dwarf you took what you could get, and this was the broke down neighbourhood bar that humoured the heart broken with watered down Scotch and a seedy eurotrashy decor.  Actually everywhere on Red Dwarf had that.</p><p>‘Can’t you play something else already?’ suddenly barked the other guy at Sam.</p><p>‘Sorry it’s the only tune I know,’ said Sam.  He closed the piano lid with a kind of quiet dignity and left, but before he left he added ‘I know when I’m not wanted.’</p><p>‘Good!’ suddenly barked the other guy, losing some watered down Scotch with the alacrity.  Todhunter peered dopily down the bar thru the dissipating dry ice.  The other guy lit a Marlboro Red, of course with one of those chunking metal refillable lighters that he snapped open with one hand.  ‘What are you looking at, punk?’ he suddenly started at Todhunter.</p><p>‘What am *I* looking at?’</p><p>It was just the two of them now, and the skutters, and the Jeff Koonsy pop art parakeets.  The music had stopped, the skutters dropped the mop again.</p><p>From behind the bar a hot mess gone off the rails of a girl, with copious breasts like zero G jello, spilling out of a tiny vest, like a Jewish Princess run off with a biker gang, appeared.  Tattoos and tumbling dark hair.  Trouble.  The other guy savoured and surveyed her curves as he smoked and gave her some bad boy body language.</p><p>‘What am *I* looking at?’ mimicked the other guy, cruelly exaggerating Todhunter’s fey upper class English accent.  The other guy had this American jocky bark.</p><p>The other guy winked at the hot mess girl and she crouched up with laughter, her breasts flopping across the bar, a tsunami of quivering flesh.</p><p>‘Bob!’ implored Todhunter to the hotmess girl.</p><p>‘I’m not Bob!’ she said, then she turned to the other guy: ‘And I’m not Evil Annie either.’  The engines murmured with suspense, like a muted drum roll.  ‘I’m Camille,’ she said finally before appearing in her true form, a kind of testicular, fungal, ecto-plasm-dripping Cronenberg, bedecked with a single disconcertingly bulging eyeball mounted on a kind of tentacular antenna that kind of weaved inquisitively like a shadow boxing crackhead.</p><p>‘Oh,’ said Todhunter.</p><p>‘Ship’s employing GELFs now?’ barked the other guy.</p><p>‘You better believe it, Big Boy,’ said Evil Annie, letting a stray dark lock of hair spill onto her pale breasts.</p><p>‘My God it’s unbelievable, you look just like her...’</p><p>‘Don’t worry, Todsy,’ said Bent Bob, his shirt unbuttoned to reveal the pert compactness of his pectorals, ‘I got plenty for both you boys,’ and he simultaneously poured them both a drink whilst limboing to reveal twisted gothic pychotropia to the tune of a washboard stomach.  Todhunter was briefly taken in by the slightly enhanced bulge in Bob’s tight trousers before bowing and sighing sadly into his Scotch.</p><p>‘My God it’s boring, you only look like him,’ said Todhunter, Bent Bob retreating with a shimmy of rejection.</p><p>‘What’s up, pal,’ hucked the smarmy loud mouth jock.  ‘You don’t want a threesome with Cammy Chameleon?’  Evil Annie Eviled him.  ‘What’s a matter - pussy?’</p><p>‘What?’</p><p>‘You heard me.’</p><p>‘Did I?’  Todhunter was astonished.  He really wanted to have an orgy?  He thought Todhunter was a ‘pussy’?  It was like some ancient pejorative or something he knew.  ‘I’ve had enough of threesomes,’ said Todhunter, wondering then why he felt the need to justify himself.</p><p>‘Tell me about it,’ said Camille, now as Kochanski’s Bunkmate, the woman Todhunter had been having an affair with behind Bent Bob’s back, or rather instead of behind Bent Bob’s back.  He was also married with kids, did I mention that?  Todhunter grumpily tried to swat Camille away like she was a cloud of gnats.  When he next refocused, Kochanski’s Bunkmate was playing Blue Moon at the piano.  Then the dry ice went off again.  Todhunter refused to move.  He was too weary to waste his time trying to dodge whatever blew up in his face these last few days.</p><p>‘Yeah, why don’t you tell us about it,’ said the other guy.</p><p>*I saw you standing alone* sang Camille/Kochanski’s Bunkmate.</p><p>‘Okay, okay, just stop yelling for a moment and calling me a vagina or whatever...’</p><p>*Without a love of my own...* sang Camille/Kochanksi’s Bunkmate.  The Skutters were having a nap, the parakeets were unionising.  Todhunter let out a long sigh he’d been saving for some special occasion and began.</p><p>‘Basically everyone hates me.  But it’s all this jerk from another dimension who framed me, and then later rescued me, but somehow he still really smegs me off.  He released a BEGG into the landfill on G Deck.  Now somehow he’s the toast of the town for rescuing the same stupid BEGG he released, *me* who was only imprisoned because they thought I released the blasted BEGG, and this utter crank, this wizened old Welsh ornithologist, who was incarcerated in a secret prison for stowing a live sparrow on board.  Anyway this guy’s some kind of cult cryptoconspiracy guy who everyone loves.  Meanwhile they told *my* family about Bent Bob and Kochanski’s Bunkmate, because they have some weirdly draconian thing about extramarital relationships, and that was the other guy’s alibi for not releasing the BEGG, a crime for which *I* was then administered psychotropic drugs within an AR simulation that did nothing to prove my innocence and everything to convince me I was some kind of interdimensional alien timewarrior...’</p><p>‘What’s a timewarrior...’ asked the other guy.</p><p>‘I don’t know!  Exactly!  You see?’ said Todhunter exasperated.  ‘Anyway, I’m still recovering from that, and now this guy who looks exactly like me who ruined my life is supposed to be this great hero for releasing this folklore hero Birdman guy.</p><p>‘Why don’t you just pretend to be him and take all the credit for what your better self did?’</p><p>‘That’s not a bad idea,’ said Todhunter.</p><p>‘Want to do some coke?’</p><p>‘That’s a bad idea,’ said Todhunter.</p><p>‘I’ve got some friends in Starbug 23 that can help us...’</p><p>‘Get some coke?’</p><p>‘No, frame the other Todhunter...  Evil Troy and Evil Abed... they’re super geeky... they’ll be all over this... help us find him...’  He suddenly clicked his fingers in a way that reminded him of Rimmer, the old, pretentious Rimmer.  ‘We can use Camille as bait...’  A clusterfuck of bum notes flinched their attention towards Camille who began strutting towards them with a menacing high camp that worked equally well for Bent Bob or Evil Annie.</p><p>‘What are they doing in Starbug 23?’</p><p>‘Squatting.’</p><p>‘Squatting?  Since when?’</p><p>‘Last Wednesday...’</p><p>‘Man, their knees must be sore...’</p><p>The sexymetrosexual guy was shaking his head with disbelief and disquiet, kind of making his eyeballs bulge as if regulating the heat of a mouthful of strong curry, when Evil Annie’s chipped razor nails guided the meticulous stubble of his perfect chin to meet her greedy gaze.</p><p>‘I’m not bait, mate,’ she said, before getting hysterics, straddling his knee with her bare thighs and getting real close, so he could feel her heat, her boiling breasts, within tickling distance of a dynamically arranged hair do.  Then she exhaled her hot breath, condensing across his manicured stubble moustache and suddenly flounced in the other direction in a nice demonstration of the body mass index of the backs of her thighs, to the pool table.  She sauntered back with an orange pool ball and when she was real close, so his moustache was misting up good, too close for him to see, she kissed the ball, slowly lowered it, adjusted herself, raised both hands, emitted a crunching sound, like eating crunchy crisps ASMR, and brought the ball up as dust.</p><p>‘Let’s sell it to Other Todhunter, tell him it’s coke.’</p><p>‘Why do you hate that guy so much?’ asked Evil Annie, sprinkling ball ash playfully as he moved his Scotch out of the way irritably and she dug her knee into his balls.</p><p>‘What’s it like to have such control over people?  To have perfect, complete control over people because you always know you are their ideal sex object... wait a minute what am I *saying*?’  He cloched his forehead with the heal of his hand sarcastically.  Camille dug Evil Annie’s knee deeper into his balls, threatening to turn them to dust.</p><p>‘But I’m not a person, am I?’ said Camille.</p><p>‘Aren’t you?’ said Todhunter, waking in a daze.  ‘Am I?’</p><p>‘You’re always the same...’</p><p>‘*Sometimes* I bottom...’ said Todhunter, thoughtfully.</p><p>‘Where is everybody?  It’s Friday night...’</p><p>‘Look they’re livestreaming on Smeg Tube...’  Todhunter punched a couple of searchwords into a tablet on the bar and propped it up so the other guy could see </p><p>‘The whole ship has heard about the dramatic rescue of a baby GELF tonight in Red Dwarf’s Garbage Bay via a new technology called The Internet,’ spieled Carol McCauley, livestreaming from behind banks of cuboidal compacted waste.  ‘As you know because I’m livestreaming to you on it now.  The GELF was rescued by a version of Todhunter from another dimension who unlike our Todhunter is brave and amazing and not a philandering jerk who occasionally bottoms...’</p><p>‘What?  Off.  *Off*,’ barked Todhunter.  ‘That sunuva...’  He reached for the whisky and guiltily downed it from the bottle under Bent Bob’s brooding scrutiny.  Camille was right, he was always the same.  Being a person sucked.</p><p>‘Hey...!’</p><p>‘Ow!’ said the other handsome guy as Camille entrenched Evil Annie’s knee further into his testicles.</p><p>‘...You never answered my question:  Why do you hate this other Todhunter guy so much?  You don’t even *like* Todhunter that much!’</p><p>‘Okayokayokay!  Give me some knackerslack and I’ll answer.’  She adjusted her knee and he exhaled.  ‘You’re right, I don’t like Todhunter that much...’ he said straight to Todhunter’s face.</p><p>‘That unironically is the kindest thing anyone’s said about me for some time...’</p><p>‘...He’s kind of sissy,’ he continued.  ‘Thing is, I never introduced myself.  The name’s Jeff,’ he said smarmily, and then on the shake ‘Evil Jeff.’</p><p>‘Oh.  Well I guess I’m Evil Todhunter, according to Smeg Tube...’ said Todhunter.</p><p>‘I could be Evil Evil Annie,’ said the sex fantasy version of Evil Annie to Evil Jeff.</p><p>‘There’s plenty of coke and sex toys on Starbug 23,’ said Evil Jeff licking his lips.</p><p>Just then, Sam appeared in the doorway again.</p><p>‘Hey,’ said Evil Jeff.  ‘I thought you said you know when you’re not wanted.’</p><p>‘Jerk!’ said Sam to Evil Jeff, then to Camille ‘You’re missing the Birdman Returns event.’</p><p>‘Why would I want to go to some event celebrating some smeghead doing a bad Todhunter impression...’</p><p>‘That’s tomorrow night,’ said Sam, narrowing his eyes with hostility.  ‘I was talking to McIntyre...’</p><p>‘When I switched myself to lightbee and flew up your pants last night,’ said McIntyre Camille in a nervous, sibilant, delicate Welsh dialect ‘and I smelt all the garbage up there, it was so delicious, roiling in your testicle grease, your junk funk, the vestiges of a burrito.’</p><p>‘McIntyre?  How can he?  Can he?  Oh.’  Sputtered Todhunter, almost polishing off the whisky.</p><p>‘That’s right,’ said Sam, openly ‘he’s basically an all purpose sex toy...’</p><p>‘Hate to break your heart, butty,’ said McIntryre ‘But I’m smegged if I know where your toyfriend’s gone, I’m just an hallucination of a hologrammatic representation of McIntyre.’</p><p>‘Oh, you’re a GELF,’ said Sam, puppyishly.  ‘I’ve never met one before.  Hollister’s relaxing restrictions on GELF immigration.  There’s been a huge war in the...’  He hacked out a cough like a Victorian orphan ‘...Quadrant...’</p><p>‘If you say that again about my mother I’ll fly up your dick next time.’</p><p>‘Sorry, I’ve just started learning.’  He diligently opened the translation app on his phone to check the pronunciation.</p><p>‘Jesus and Mary,’ said Evil Jeff.  ‘Can this scene just hurry up already, I feel like we’ve been in this bar for like ever.’</p><p>‘Are you a GELF as well?’ said Sam sweetly.</p><p>‘I’m an *alien*, an evil alien, from another dimension...’</p><p>‘Oh wow, yeah, it must be really hard for you, no wonder you’re all sitting here getting drunk together.  Drowning your sorrows...’</p><p>‘Shut the smeg up,’ said Todhunter.</p><p>‘Especially you Todhunter, everyone thinks you’re a smeghead... especially when compared to the more heroic *interdimensional* you...’</p><p>Todhunter got up.  The smoke machine went off and he lost balance, spreading across the badly mopped floor.  Camille, Evil Jeff and Sam all left, stepping respectfully over Todhunter’s body as they did so.  Todhunter chasing after them with a limp, pathetically trying to preserve his shot of whisky, as the stars spin in a drunken vortex.  Suddenly the corridors are populated.  The event is dissipating across the ship, like the blood to Todhunter’s face.  Red Dwarf.</p><p>How did he end up here, and why, having ended up here, couldn’t he quit being such a magnificent dick slinger for a moment?  Deep questions, it was that kind of night.  Why was he being persecuted by this Look-e-Like-e.  As he just cleared the lift door, he heard a second of twee music and the XPress Lifts ident before Evil Jeff pulled out a rusty hammer and repeatedly and repetitively smashed the screen and speakers, showering them in hot sparks and smoke until the twee music stopped.  When he was done the smoke cleared to reveal Todhunter shaking in the corner.  Evil Jeff sat down with satisfaction, making himself comfortable, pulling out his tablet.</p><p>‘I wanna watch the end of this speech.  I told you you were a sissy...’</p><p>‘You said I was a pussy.’</p><p>‘I said you were a sissy and a pussy.’</p><p>‘Interdimensionals are so macho,’ said McIntyre, imaginary-fanning his horniness away.</p><p>‘I’m joined here now by Garbage Worker 1 from the Jupiter Garbage Worker’s Union,’ said Carol McCauley as she was joined by Garbage Worker 1.  ‘How come the garbage is compacted into cubes when it’s then launched into effectively infinite space?’</p><p>The garbage worker was momentarily stumped, before coming out with ‘Cubes.  It’s more tidy.  Keep space tidy.’</p><p>‘By... launching cubes of rubbish into it.’</p><p>‘Exactly.’ </p><p>‘So you’re unhappy about the competition and want to see GELFs forbidden from employment...’  Camille and Sam booed, Todhunter and Evil Jeff didn’t care.  Maybe Todhunter really was Evil Todhunter.</p><p>‘You heard what Birdman said, the fertility rate of Red Dwarf is 0.  Everyone’s queer or shagging around.  And we like it that way.  Like a giant cool adult hipster neighbourhood, right?’</p><p>‘Where are we going to get money from?’</p><p>‘We’ll figure that out, we always figure something out.’</p><p>‘So we’re just going to get GELFs to do everything?’</p><p>‘GELFs, interdimensionals, mechs, cats...’</p><p>‘Oh not that rubbish..’</p><p>‘It’s a community, everyone’s together, in the rubbish, with their different problems, it’s a healing thing.... it’s...’</p><p>‘It’s a load of cubes.’</p><p>‘Racist Bullsmeg,’ said Sam.  Camille remained silent.  Evil Jeff was smarting from the ‘cubes’ line.  </p><p>‘You hear that?’ he said, kicking Todhunter, ‘you little quivering Cubepacker!’</p><p>‘Leave him alone!’ said Camille.  Then suddenly gaily ‘We’re here!’  The lift shattered to a stop, releasing a few recalcitrant sparks onto the nape of Todhunter’s neck.</p><p>‘Ow!’ said Todhunter.</p><p>‘Sissy,’ said Evil Jeff.</p><p>‘Stop it!’ said Sam.  They were exiting the lift.</p><p>‘Okay!’ said Evil Jeff.  ‘That’s it!  Now, it’s unclear why you’re tagging along with me and my pussypal Todhunter for this little shindig.  This attempt to clear my pussypal’s good name, with the utmost dishonesty....’  Camille and Sam looked quizzically, sceptically at each other.  Why were they here again?  Bait?  That didn’t sound like a good idea.  But there was something about the man’s Evil charisma, plus the way he emasculated Todhunter gave Sam always a soft boner.</p><p>‘...But if you two don’t stop rrrrrriding my balls, you’re not allowed to meet my cool interdimensional friends.’  That did sound pretty cool but Evil Jeff was already starting to panic, sensing his rhetoric had gone off the skids.  ‘Hey wanna see a cool secret invisible spaceship?’  He went boop beep boop on the door behind him which glided open revealing one of the Dwarf’s many landing bays.  The place resounded with metallic nothingness, the inside of a giant bell that never rang.  The place was empty, save a latticework of Police Tape.  Evil Jeff swaggered through it, letting it wrap around his body.  He froze, put his hands up, and made like he was delineating the edge of an invisible object.</p><p>‘Mime?  Seriously?  You took us all the way here for that?’ said Sam, his voice echoing from gantry to gantry.</p><p>‘No it’s real dummy, look...’  He climbed the invisible stairs and when he reached the top he said with exaggeratedly precise pronunciation: ‘Uncle Frank.’  The interior of the Wildfire dilated itself out of thin air and Evil Jeff stepped in.</p><p>‘Smeg off, jerk...’ said the computer.  ‘You’re a jerky, jocky kind of guy... a braggard with little wee testicles.’</p><p>‘It’s a Dimension Jumper,’ he shouted down ‘Deep Dwarf secret.  Can’t work out how to use it...’</p><p>‘How does she know about your testicles?’ shouted up Camille.</p><p>‘Nano-seating...’ said the computer.  Evil Jeff stood up with a start, banging his head, cursing and began descending the steps.  </p><p>‘Save it for Sam...’</p><p>‘Todhunter occasionally bottoms too,’ said the computer.</p><p>‘How did you know that?’</p><p>‘Smeg Tube.’</p><p>‘This way,’ he said when he reached the bottom of the stairs, trying to shore up his authority. </p><p>In the next landing bay along the strangulated serrating frequencies of Rasta Billy Skank became even more sickening with the acoustic effects of the wide open hangar.  In a regrettable case of synaesthesia the paint job they had done on the Bug didn’t improve on the classic monochrome, calming green, but reflected the music perfectly like a cobwebbed gore festooned carwreck mirror.  The smell was hideous, you could dive into the Garbage Bay like it was potpourri after this.</p><p>They clanked up the stairs in silence for there was no choice, such was the roar of uncomfortable dentist drill frequencies and stomach churning, head compressing bass.  When they opened the airlock the sound became deafening and Evil Jeff screamed at the top of his lungs, his neck veins protruding phallically, exciting Sam, before smashing the turn table and sound system with his hammer until the music relented.</p><p>‘Hey, what did you do that for?’ said the gap year goa girl, pausing her disconcerting head banging.  ‘You crimped my high...’  The rest of the Bug’s occupants remained transfixed by a map of the city that encrusted Red Dwarf’s nominal ‘roof’ like barnacles.  The map was spread out on an old vending machine that had been arranged horizontally.  The excellent navigation tables that came as standard spec for all Bugs, was propped on its side and plastered in gory movie posters.  Everything in the ship had been repurposed, downcycled to no apparent end.  It wasn’t even aesthetic like some Situationist artwork, they had just petulantly reduced the utility of everything.</p><p>‘Cinema hot dog?  Anyone?’  Evil Jeff continued to pass out the hot dogs even though no-one wanted them.  Revoltingly long, thin and flaccid, tending to break easily and cover the recipient’s hands in vile juice, the hotdogs were passed along a chain that ended in an overflowing dustbin.  Signifiers of evil.  A chain of signifiers.  Signifying chains.  There were chains and all kinds of kinkinalia, strewn about and cut with hotdog juice and gore video cassette cases.  Space weevils jacked on whatever they’d nibbled out of the Goa Gap Year Girl’s hemp satchel that day, shuffled neurotically under bike grease newspapers avoiding the snarling phalanx of emohawks straining to break yet more chains.</p><p>The glow of the vending machine lit Evil Troy’s face ominously as he looked up from the map at his erstwhile flying mate, Evil Abed, and asked, gruffly and rhetorically ‘Can you get us there?’</p><p>‘Does mouse shit roll?’ countered Evil Abed.</p><p>‘At a push,’ said Evil Jeff, sauntering up to the vending machine.</p><p>‘The lie down is appreciated, but you know how this affects my warran-TEE!’ the vending machine screamed as Evil Jeff pounded his fist down.  Evil Annie, Evil Britta and Camille, who was Evil Annie and Evil Britta at the same time in a kind of paralax, engaged in a three way snog/caress that Evil Jeff greatly appreciated, but Sam seamed to take offense to.</p><p>‘By calling yourself Evil and engaging in lesbianism and polyamory aren’t you kind of implying that those things are evil?  Isn’t this all a bit homophobic?  I mean the cinema hotdogs and gore movies are really gross but...’</p><p>‘Yeah,’ chipped in Todhunter, the last to gather round the semiwilling table.  ‘I’m polyamorous.’</p><p>‘Bullsmeg,’ said Evil Britta ‘Everyone knows you’re a cheat!’</p><p>‘And Sam!’ chipped in Evil Annie ‘Your boyfriend’s dead you weird necrophile!’</p><p>‘Anyway,’ said Evil Britta, lipstick and saliva smeared all over her face ‘We’re not really into this in a gay way...’</p><p>‘No,’ said Evil Annie.  They were taking it in turns to take breaks from the kissing and caressing and undressing.  ‘We’re hate-snogging.’</p><p>‘I likes me some hate snogging,’ leered Evil Jeff, taking a swig of whiskey.</p><p>‘Look, are we going to kidnap this imposter or what?  This is starting to drag more than that bar scene.’</p><p>‘Fair point,’ said Evil Jeff, always guarded against prolixity.  He strode half cocked into the cockpit and what remained of the lights tinged on.  He stood at the prow of the ship, clinking open his lighter and igniting a Leopard Light.</p><p>‘Please state your name and clearance code,’ asked the ground controller.</p><p>‘Alright, alright...’ shouted Evil Jeff drunkenly, obstreperously.</p><p>‘Are you alright, sir?’</p><p>The obviously drunk bar jock leaned backwards awkwardly like a zombie as Evil Abed whispered something in his ear before taking the driving seat, followed by Evil Troy to his left.</p><p>‘Carol Brown,’ said the obviously drunk man confidently ‘Clearance Code 0 1 0 1 0 1.’</p><p>‘That’s not a thing,’ said Ground Control.</p><p>‘What do you mean that’s not a thing, it’s what you asked for, start the engines, Abed...’</p><p>Evil Abed started the engines. </p><p>‘Wait!’ said ground control.  ‘Who are you?’</p><p>‘I just told you: Carol Brown,’ said Evil Jeff.</p><p>‘Carol Brown is my wife,’ said the ground controller.</p><p>‘Different Carol Brown,’ said Evil Jeff, petulantly.</p><p>‘This isn’t going to work,’ said Evil Abed, seriously.</p><p>‘And the clearance code, it’s not even a clearance code, that’s a different thing, that’s for ship protocols, how did you know that?’</p><p>‘Um,’ said Evil Jeff.  He leaned back for further whispered advice from Evil Abed.  ‘Troy!  Do a dance!’ he urgently stage whispered to Evil Troy.  ‘It’s from Back in the Red, the Cat does a dance, they let them off the ship... don’t they?’</p><p>Evil Troy tried gamely to krunk with Evil Jeff to no music.  Ground control looked increasingly worried about these dancing drunkards who’s stolen her wife’s ship protocol ident.  Evil Troy and Evil Jeff were getting tired of dancing to no music and were sweating profusely and panting loudly and they put their arms on each other’s bent over backs, and caught their breath.  Ground Control was slow clapping them when Evil Abed hit the mute button and the crossed out mic appeared on the screen displaying her sarcastic face.</p><p>‘I’ve got an idea.  I’m just spit balling but what if there was some kind of override code for ship to surface vessel like this, so Deep Dwarf members and special secret people could commandeer vessels quickly to some plan that extends beyond banal mining?  Some kind of keyword that you just have to say in a sentence and the ground controller has to let you launch no matter what, like even if you infringed her wife’s privacy and then did a terrible dance that was more awkward than that dancing to no music scene in The Office, lost your breath and muted yourself while I explained this whole pointless hypothesis...’</p><p>‘Why pointless?’ asked Evil Jeff.</p><p>‘We don’t know what the keyword is,’ said Evil Abed simply.</p><p>‘God DAMN you, Abed,’ exploded Evil Jeff, smashing a hammer down on the console, spritzing them with hot white sparks.</p><p>‘Er, I think you just broke the ship, Jeff,’ said Evil Troy, quietly, simply.</p><p>‘God DAMN you, Troy,’ exploded Evil Jeff, smashing the console again.</p><p>‘That actually did break the ship, first time I was joking,’ said Evil Troy.</p><p>‘Wait, wait, wait,’ said Sam three times, but actually just once.  ‘But what *would* the keyword be if we did know it?’  Sam was sat behind Evil Abed, in the Kryten seat, Todhunter in the Rimmer seat.</p><p>‘I got it,’ said Evil Britta, appearing in the doorway and delving into her drugs bag.  ‘Just need to rootle it out somewhere,’ she said to herself as she searched.</p><p>‘”Rootle”, did you just say “Rootle”?’ enquired Sam.</p><p>‘Maybe “Rootle”’s the keyword,’ said Todhunter.</p><p>‘Maybe “Rootle” *is* the keyword,’ said Evil Troy.</p><p>‘It’s not the keyword, it’s not a word, it doesn’t go in a sentence, shut up, shut up, shut up!’ said Evil Abed .</p><p>‘Hey, Camille, take this,’ said Evil Britta.</p><p>‘What is it?’  said Camille.</p><p>‘Ol’ Lady Luck,’ said Evil Britta.</p><p>‘You mean it’s the Luck Virus,’ said Camille.</p><p>‘Yeah,’ said Evil Britta, looking disappointed.  Camille took a drop and everyone looked at her expectantly.  Camille didn’t know what to do, vacillating in their desires, suspended.</p><p>‘Oh, oh, oh kay,’ said Evil Britta, ‘has anyone got a book?’</p><p>‘Does anyone *look* like they’ve got a book,’ said Evil Troy.</p><p>‘We’re Evil, we don’t have books,’ said Evil Jeff.</p><p>‘Evil people have books, they’re cultured and like classical music.’</p><p>‘Different brand of Evil,’ said Evil Annie, appearing in the doorway.</p><p>‘You’re off brand Abed,’ said Evil Britta, giving Evil Abed evils.</p><p>‘*I* look like I’ve got a book,’ said non-Evil Sam, taking exception.</p><p>‘*Have* you got a book?’ asked Todhunter.</p><p>‘No,’ said Sam.</p><p>‘We’ve got this ancient fanfic we printed out off some website, it’s how we located the other Todhunter, or Ace as he’s known, that’s if we’re right.  Anyway, even if we’re wrong, put it on the dart board and see what word Camille hits.’</p><p>Camille’s tentacle gripped the dart, precariously creating a strange shadow across the weirdly lit cockpit.  She released it and it skeetered across the dash and jammed into some switch which controlled the AM/FM inflight stereo.  It was Musical Time, a show which played songs from musicals for a length of time and right that second they were playing ‘Because, because, because, because, the Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ before it jammed and cut out and sent out yet more sparks.  There was a pause...</p><p>‘We could use one of these low grade lesbian exploitation flicks, pick a word randomly out of that...’ </p><p>Evil Annie proffered the video cover to Evil Jeff and he paid it little heed, saying ‘I’ll probably end up saying that to her anyway,’ and casting it aside.</p><p>‘It’s “because” you dumb dumbs... Because because because because” – they sing it four smegging times, how can you miss that?’</p><p>‘They sing “Because because because because” *once*,’ corrected Evil Abed ‘Then they sing “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”’</p><p>‘That’s *so* annoying,’ said Todhunter, facepalming.</p><p>‘Okay,’ said Evil Jeff, pressing the unmute button.  On the screen Carol Brown had joined the Ground Controller.  She looked angry.</p><p>‘What is the meaning of hacking into Holly’s databanks and stealing my ident number?’</p><p>‘Oh, you must be... yeah, big mistake, wrong Carol Brown...’</p><p>‘With the same ident number as me?’</p><p>‘We were asked for a clearance code...’</p><p>‘...and you gave my ident number.’</p><p>Evil Abed whispered something in his ear.  ‘Isn’t it illegal under Space Corp Direction 2323 that states no officer may reveal their ident number except to save ship and crew?’</p><p>‘No,’ said Carol Brown ‘It’s illegal under Space Corp Directive 2324, 2323 pertains to the use of talking reconstituted wheat heating appliances on long haul solo missions...’</p><p>‘What does it say?’ asked Evil Abed, pointlessly.</p><p>‘That there shouldn’t be any.’</p><p>‘I’ve adapted a Talkie Toaster,’ said Evil Britta, ‘rootling’ around her stuff.  ‘Here it is!’  She switched it on.</p><p>‘Would anyone like any coke?  Would anyone like any coke?  Would anyone like coke?’ it chimed incessantly, it’s levers popping up and down and clouds of fine powder billowing from its grill.</p><p>‘You don’t do toast as well?’</p><p>‘Rock cake?’ said the Talkie Toaster after a pause.  Evil Jeff attacked it with the hammer.  Todhunter clambered into a foetal position.  Carol Brown cleared her throat noisily, just as they wished to noisily clear Red Dwarf.</p><p>‘I am the executive officer of the Mining Ship Red Dwarf, why do you know my ident number?’</p><p>There was a long pause.</p><p>‘”Because”,’ said Evil Jeff finally.  Carol Brown, holding her breath, nodded at her wife, the Ground Controller, who pressed a button.  The Bug rotated and lights came on.  The rusty gates started grinding open, making a sound like Kochanksi making love.</p><p>‘Hit the retros,’ said Evil Jeff.  ‘She rides.  I can’t believe they let some Evil Dimensional Squatters get clearance for take off like that... What a bunch of dumb-dumbs, wait I’ll say it twice, dumb-dumb-dumb-dumbs... See, who can count dumby,’ he said to Todhunter, punching his shoulder too hard.  Todhunter was too tired to not look hurt.  ‘We’re *helping* you...’</p><p>‘Hey,’ said Carol Brown.  ‘You left the mic on.  We’ve decided to let you leave but only if you do the bad dance to no music again, but for a whole ten minutes... and we’re filming.’</p><p>Evil Jeff had already started to do the bow legged hand swap move as the lights went down, the Bug stooped at an angle and the cargo bay doors began to close again, making a sound like Kochanski making love backwards.</p><p>‘Look,’ said Evil Abed, accelerating, ‘it must be the luck virus, some piece of space junk has got lodged in the doors and there’s just enough room that if I twist back sideways and... YES!’</p><p>The Bug arced elegantly away from the mothership, sending Evil Jeff and Evil Troy flying like the stars above their whisky soaked heads.  Evil Annie and Evil Britta collapsed into Camille who was built like a brick smeghouse, 1000 times stronger than humans but also flabby and juicy, a military mutant designed for the most traditional line of work there was.  So Evil Annie and Britta were fine, and started making out with Camille as soon as the craft righted itself, sailing through the deserted red city atop the pudgy hexagonal vessel.</p><p>‘There she blows!’ said Evil Abed ‘Well she doesn’t blow, but there it is, the Mimas Embassy.’  They hovered above a pill shaped building, painted the same red as everything else, beneath a plexiglass cloche protecting the Ambassadorial Rose Garden, named after the 23rd Ambassador of Mimas, Ambassador Rose Garden.</p><p>‘Don’t get too close, we don’t want to rattle the natives,’ said Evil Troy.  ‘Park it over there!’  Evil Troy pointed to a fan-like building, like flattened out pineapple chunks, or a hand of cards.</p><p>‘”Park it?”’ said Todhunter.  ‘Are you guys sure you know what you’re doing?’</p><p>‘I thought the Luck Virus was supposed to bring your fantasies to life!  This isn’t my fantasy,’ said Evil Jeff, who didn’t have a crash-mat Camille or a safety belt when the Bug went spiralling out the cargo bay doors.  He looked like... well, frankly he looked like smeg at this stage anyway.</p><p>‘No, it’s mine,’ said Evil Troy, helping ease the bug down behind the fan shaped building.</p><p>‘Right, ready?’ said Evil Annie from the midsection.  She and Camille and Evil Britta were dressed in these kind of milkmaid uniforms, white lab coats and white Police hats.  With nothing underneath.</p><p>‘That’s my fantasy!’ said Evil Jeff, as they left for the landing bay.  ‘Hubba-hubba!  He said once.  Don’t wait up boys!’ he said, winking and leaving.</p><p>‘What a jerk-arse,’ said Sam, as Evil Jeff left.</p><p>‘You’re telling me!’ said Todhunter.</p><p>‘I’m just saying to everyone, generally,’ protested Sam, not getting it.</p><p>‘You heard him, he’s trying to help you.’  Evil Troy leaned forward and adjusted the dart on the dash.  New York, New York came out of the crusty overdriven speakers and it seemed to fit the art deco monolith shielding them.</p><p>‘Yeah about that,’ began Todhunter, willing to take advantage of the calm sanity of a Evil Jeffless environment.  ‘Why *is* he trying to help me?’</p><p>There was a pause long enough for the magnitude of this empty city to start sinking in.  So much emptiness with that degree of detail.  An empty mailbox, empty lift, empty revolving door...</p><p>‘UST,’ said Evil Abed eventually.</p><p>‘What’s the United States of Titan got to do with it?’ asked Sam.</p><p>‘UST.  Unresolved Sexual Tension, it’s a principal of 1990s sitcom writing, it’s why Friends stopped working when Ross and Rachel got together,’ helped Evil Abed.</p><p>‘So?’ asked Todhunter.  Evil Abed sighed patiently and Evil Troy rolled his eyes at him, Todhunter that is.  The dormant metropolis said nothing.</p><p>‘Imagine Red Dwarf is like a show: who would be the main characters?’ began Evil Abed.</p><p>‘Well Rimmer and Lister I guess...’</p><p>‘Exactly!  Everything revolves around them!  They always turn out to know everyone and to be there when anything happens.  It’s almost like the rest of us are minor characters orbiting some narrative that’s really about them.’</p><p>‘I suppose so.’</p><p>‘And the main characters in a show have to fancy each other, right?’ continued Evil Troy.  ‘It has to kind of... crackle between them.  But they mustn’t consummate...’</p><p>‘No they mustn’t consummate...’ said Evil Abed.</p><p>‘No they mustn’t consummate...’ said Evil Troy.</p><p>‘Er, it,’ said Evil Abed finally.</p><p>‘We could do a song of that!’ said Evil Troy, covering one ear, cowering and squealing possible falsetto harmony lines.</p><p>‘Guys!  What’s this got to do with me?’</p><p>‘It’s not about you, it’s about your alterego – the other Todhunter,’ said Evil Troy</p><p>‘That’s kind of the problem as I see it.’ </p><p>‘We’ll *make* it about you.  *We’ll* take the other Todhunter in return.’</p><p>‘What do you want with him?’</p><p>‘We can use him to break up Lister and Rimmer, dumbass.’</p><p>‘Who is he?’</p><p>‘He’s Rimmer, from another dimension, disguised as you, in hardlight hologram form.’</p><p>‘He’s a Hologram?’</p><p>‘”He’s a Hologram?” Listen to yourself like a little puppy skipping around on the backseat there,’ said Evil Troy, Looking at his Evil reflection in the Bug’s visor.</p><p>‘He said he’s a hologram didn’t he?’ said Evil Abed with controlled anger.  After a pause he stood up mechanically, grabbed the hammer and smashed the dash with scarily measured rage, releasing sparks and causing the music to stop in the middle of Supercalifragilisticexpialadocious.  He sat back down again.</p><p>‘Well this is fun,’ said Sam, innocently.</p><p>‘Would anyone like any coke?’ offered Talkie Pusher, puffing clouds of the stuff into their faces.</p><p>These guys are kind of edgy, thought Todhunter, but he was too smashed to care.  Maybe he’d wake up dead.  It didn’t make sense but it sounded cool.  On this much whiskey you could bet he’d wake up dead.  Oh God what was it going to be like waking up dead any minute.  The white stars teemed like gnats in his eyes as he tried to make sense of the geometry of the red city and got sucked into the deep black of space, where the Universe sleeps, the background.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>‘I must carefully remove this medieval vice from my head,’ thought Todhunter upon waking seemingly moments later.  ‘Oh, there isn’t some kind of torture device on my head, I’m hung over but I am trapped in a cage.  I’m literally trapped in a cage.’</p><p>Todhunter was trapped in a cage and very badly hungover.  He was hunched up in there - it wasn’t big enough to lie down, kind of the same dimensions as a phone box.  He looked around him.  He was on the same squatted Bug as before, festooned in oily rags and dark countercultural garb.  In the low nightmode lighting of the Bug, emanating from door frames and danger points, Todhunter could make out six blobs like Camille scattered about the midsection.  They were all apparently asleep.</p><p>‘Hey!’ shouted Todhunter.  ‘What the smeg is going on???’</p><p>‘H-huh?  Whu?’ said Evil Jeff Blob.  ‘God, I feel like shit on sticks...’</p><p>‘Wait till you see how you look,’ said Todhunter.</p><p>‘Well I can’t look as bad as everyone else – they’ve all turned into bl-?’</p><p>‘You’ve turned into a blob, too.’</p><p>‘Two blobs for me, man,’ said Evil Troy Blob, still asleep.</p><p>‘Oh my God, you’ve all turned into blobs,’ said Evil Britta Blob, just coming to.</p><p>‘You’re a blob too,’ said Evil Annie Blob, grasping the situation more accurately.</p><p>‘Yeah, that would be great with bacon and beans,’ said Sam Blob, still sleeping.</p><p>‘Would anyone like any coke?’ said Talkie.</p><p>‘Talkie hasn’t turned into a blob,’ said Evil Jeff Blob, hopefully.</p><p>‘Nor has Ace,’ said Evil Annie Blob.</p><p>‘Maybe he’s protected by the cage,’ said Evil Abed Blob, getting to grips with the situation.</p><p>‘It’s Todhunter to you – why the smeg am I in a cage?  Am I supposed to be grateful that I haven’t turned into a blob?’</p><p>Evil Abed blob slowly smoothly moved towards Todhunter’s cage, extended his eyeball like a periscope, stared into each of Todhunter’s eyes in turn.  ‘You don’t fool me, pilgrim,’ he said.</p><p>‘What do you mean “pilgrim”?’</p><p>‘I don’t know it just sounded right,’ said Evil Abed Blob.</p><p>‘You don’t believe I’m Todhunter?’</p><p>‘No.  Last person I saw wearing that cage was a certain Ace Rimmer.  He looked a lot like you....’</p><p>‘He looks a lot like me.  Except for the cage!’ Todhunter said angrily, kind of tough he thought.  ‘Where’s Ace?’</p><p>‘Er, he’s in front of me, he’s you...’</p><p>‘Yeah?  So why are you a blob then?’</p><p>‘Less of the body shaming, okay?’</p><p>‘Would anyone like any coke?’</p><p>‘Wait a minute,’ said Evil Jeff Blob, almost soberly, ‘one, two, three, four, five, six eyballs.’</p><p>‘Oh, I couldn’t eat six,’ said Evil Troy Blob, still sleeping.</p><p>‘We’re one eyeball short.  Okay, everyone up, UP, *UP*.  Right, blob rollcall:  Evil Troy Blob...’</p><p>‘Okay, okay, I’m awake but you know you guys have all turned into blobs right?’</p><p>‘Evil Abed Blob...’</p><p>‘Check...’</p><p>‘Evil Britta Blob...</p><p>‘Check...’</p><p>‘Evil Annie Blob...’</p><p>‘Check...’</p><p>‘Evil Sam Blob...’</p><p>‘Check... wait I’m not Evil.  Wait, I’m a blob?!’  Sam Blob had just woken up.</p><p>‘And Ace is still in the cage, so Todhunter’s missing, oh well, nice guy, but kind of a pussy if you ask me....’</p><p>‘So I’m putting you all down for coke then?’ said Talkie Pusher.</p><p>‘Stop rattling the guy’s cage!’ said Evil Troy Blob.</p><p>‘It’s a grill actually,’ said Talkie.</p><p>‘Not you - Todhunter.  He knows it’s you.  Ace is nothing like you.  He’s a cool guy.’</p><p>‘Whew, can someone let me out then, please?’</p><p>‘No,’ said Evil Jeff Blob.  ‘We threw the key away.  Ace must have done the old switcheroo, downloaded his personality files from his light bee using some kind of conversion app on his smeg phone and emailed it to his accomplice who mastered it onto mini-cassette and injected it into Todhunter’s brain.  Meanwhile, he’s got the Hologram Projection Unit in cahoots, tracking spare on ship lightbees with your personality disc.’</p><p>‘Oh yeah, Ace is a hologram...’</p><p>‘You’re a hologram, Ace has scarpered off with your body...’</p><p>Evil Abed silently cursed himself for not thinking of this.  Rimmer had a history of stealing people’s bodies.  He was probably stuffing himself with cream cakes right now. </p><p>‘What about Camille?’ said Evil Britta Blob.</p><p>‘Oh yeah, Original Blob,’ said Evil Jeff Blob.  It was easy to forget Camille, what with her appearing most of the time as other people, doubling up, filling in the gaps.  The gaps left by desire.</p><p>‘Why are we all blobs?’ said Evil Annie Blob, simply.</p><p>‘I don’t care why you’re all blobs!’ screamed Todhunter from his cage.  ‘Just get me back in my body and out of this cage for smeg’s sake what kind of mickey mouse bullsmeg bollucks bloody joke is this?!!’</p><p>‘He’s got a point,’ said Evil Jeff Blob, calmly.</p><p>In Todhunter’s dream they were back in Parrot’s talking to Bent Bob, but he had all these giant Jeff Koonsy fake-inflatable oversize parrot sculptures crowding him out.  Like the cage, and the evil blobs, and the general madness that had descended on his life ever since Ace Rimmer came to town. Stealing his identity, then his actual body, just who did he think he was?  For some reason he hated Lister and Rimmer even more.  In the dream the oversize parrots were like Lister’s gorgeous buttcheeks, taunting him, too perfect.  Todhunter wanted them to pop like the smegging parakeets, but they were only fake inflatable sculptures that sheered bitter metallic paint powder into his eyes as he tried to focus on just one person for once in his life.</p><p>Todhunter’s return to consciousness was unpleasant, accompanied by flashing head pain.</p><p>‘What did you knock me out with, a bloody baseball bat?  You *did* use a baseball bat!’  Evil Britta tucked the baseball bat unsmoothly behind her back and it clanked to the ground making the unmistakable sound of a falling baseball bat.</p><p>‘He wasn’t you, he was Ace, I thought you hated Ace,’ said Evil Jeff Blob.</p><p>‘Really?  That’s your line of reasoning?  Ow!  Smeg!’</p><p>‘Here have some of these...’ said Evil Britta handing him a handful of unspecified pharmaceuticals.  Todhunter took them with shaking hands.  He was sitting on an old mattress on some beer crates in the midsection, slowly taking in the scene.</p><p>‘Hi, Todhunter,’ said Ace from the cage.  ‘Sorry about taking your body for a spin...’  Was he trying to sound *smooth* about this?  ‘But I think you’ll agree it’s your pleasure GELF friends who treated it the most badly.  Just so you know who your friends are.’</p><p>‘Don’t crimp my buzz, Ace, I’ve got a party to get to, a party for *Ace Rimmer*,’ said Evil Britta Blob, holding up Todhunter’s hand to indicate he was going as Ace.</p><p>‘Wait I’m not Ace, I’m Todhunter.  We did this already.  Oh, I see, yes, that was whole point wasn’t it.  I’m such an idiot.’</p><p>‘Yes, you are,’ said Evil Abed Blob.</p><p>‘So, everyone ready?’ said Evil Jeff Blob.  Evil Blobs Troy and Abed debunked to the cockpit.  Britta and Annie Evil Blobs breathed deep from the Talkie Trough, making out aggressively and clicking an old stereo that started blasting twisted Rasta Billy Skank solos, numbing everyone’s ears with white noise.  The Bug lurched lazily above the fringe of the fanned out building, like an eccentric green sun, auguring another weird day in this big red city.  Not the big red city they loomed upon, the Bug’s multi-bobble shadow licking the contours of an empty financial district.  No money.  The big red city that thrived beneath, in the corridors of the Dwarf.</p><p>‘Let us in,’ said Evil Jeff Blob, to the ground controller, a different person.</p><p>‘Why?’ asked the ground controller.</p><p>‘”Because”’ said Evil Jeff Blob.</p><p>‘Because what?’ said the ground controller.  Evil Jeff rolled his eyes.</p><p>‘Are you *new* around here or something?  Did you just turn up?  Did you get there by accident?  Are you the boss’ nephew?  An unpaid intern?  Get me someone higher up, get me Carol Brown, last time we had Carol Brown, *she* knew what she was going on thank Christ...’</p><p>‘Sir, who are you?’ </p><p>‘Do you want us to do the dance, the dance with no music?’  Evil Abed Blob whispered something in Evil Jeff Blob’s ear.</p><p>‘Why would I want you to dance with no music you smegging weirdo?’ asked the ground controller.</p><p>‘”Because”,’ said Evil Jeff Blob, hatching a pregnant pause.  The cargo bay doors dutifully opened and Evil Abed Blob gently cruised in.</p><p>‘Wait a minute, how does that make any sense?’ asked Evil Troy Blob as they came to rest.</p><p>Evil Britta Blob tapped her hemp bag, winking, Evil Britta Blob that is not the bag ‘A little help from Ol’ Lady Luck...’</p><p>‘She means she took the Luck Virus,’ Absplained Evil Abed Blob to Todhunter.</p><p>‘No but wait hang on...’ said Evil Troy Blob, still not satisfied.  ‘How does that make sense?’</p><p>‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Evil Jeff Blob.  ‘It’s party time, you’ve still got those milkmaid outfits girls?’</p><p>‘Why, you want to wear a milkmaid outfit?’ asked Evil Annie Blob.</p><p>The blobs plus Todhunter arrived on a convoy of stolen space bikes.  Early, and to a kind of weird flat vibe like Leopard Lager.  And not weird flat Leopard Lager, it’s saying something more about Leopard Lager.  Gulping too much of said drink and bulging his eyes eagerly as Todhunter entered, Hippy Rimmer got up to greet them.  The evil blobs had commandeered some GELF hooch from a scratchy *ad hoc* stall that had been set up on the corner, Evil Jeff’s hammer providing the means to secure the necessary mullah. </p><p>‘Todhunter, my man, and you’ve brought your friends.  You’ve brought our diversity quota up to fifty percent!  Thank you!’</p><p>‘Ignore ‘im,’ said Lister from the bunk, munching potato crisps sullenly.  ‘Don’t commodify them Rimmer, they’re individuals, they don’t care about your crypto-fascist PC bunk!’</p><p>‘Bunk, aye?’  It was like they were having a fight.</p><p>‘Bunk.  Or is it bunkum?’  Carol McCauley, sitting by Lister on the bottom bunkum, giggling and tipping beer on McGruder, who sat next to her. </p><p>‘Psst!’ she said, offering a joint to Todhunter.  Todhunter didn’t smoke joints, he was more a whisky guy, but Evil Jeff had really drunk him under the vending machine.  God knows what it would take to get the guy drunk as a pleasure GELF.  He watched the evil blobs easily mingle with Chen, Selby and Petersen.  McIntyre had come around to complain about the racket and Sam was trying to explain to him that he’d run away with evil people from an alternative fictional metadimension, and that he’d been turned into a blob now.</p><p>‘So how comes you know so many GELFs then?’ asked McCauley, tactlessly.</p><p>‘I live with them in a squat,’ said Todhunter.</p><p>‘That’s so cool,’ said McCauley, leaning forward with interest, the bunklight playing on her breasts.  ‘You’re an interesting kind of chap, Todhunter,’ she said, using the kind of word she imagined he’d use.  ‘How come you get such a bad rub on social media?’</p><p>‘That’s Todhunter, I’m Ace, the guy this whole party’s for.’</p><p>‘Wow, “this whole party”,’ she snarked, shouldering Lister, trying to share the joke, with her shoulders.  I’m losing her, thought Todhunter.  McCauley had already got bored of the whole Ace thing, she was a hyper-social-mediator.</p><p>‘There’s a phalanx of emohawks, too.  In the squat.  But they’re too dangerous to bring out.  Suck your emotions clean out.’</p><p>‘Emotional vampires, they’re the worst at parties.’</p><p>‘Talking of parties, when’s this one starting?’ said McGruder.</p><p>‘Starting?’ said Todhunter.</p><p>‘Yeah, when’s Ace getting here?’ said McCauley.</p><p>‘I am Ace,’ said Todhunter.</p><p>‘Why do you want to be Ace so bad, he’s just some do-gooder, you’ve got the whole bad boy thing going on.’</p><p>‘We rigged a Talkie Toaster so it dispenses coke, pushes drugs...’</p><p>‘That’s so zany!’ said Carol McCauley.  ‘Ace would never do anything like that!’</p><p>‘That’s right,’ said Lister, getting back his holojoint from Selby ‘Because it’s stupid.  It’s a stupid idea on top of an already stupid thing, like stupid butter on stupid toast.’  He elbowed Todhunter ‘Who are these Johnnies anyway?  What are you doing rolling with them?  Was it your time in the Tank?  They’re dodgy geezers aren’t they.  I’m from the Mersey I can spot that type a mile off...’</p><p>‘He’s not being racist again is he?’ said Rimmer, taking Lister’s joint, taking a big hit and handing it back to him. </p><p>‘No, they really are creeps.  I can’t believe I, Ace, sully myself with their...’ but Lister was smirking too much and convulsing with that all over body laugh he had.  It was starting to bubble up from his belly as his legs started to giddyup and he made a kind of hiccupping motion with his throat, his dimples sank deep and that weird extra dimple... Lister was an attractive guy.</p><p>‘They seem like nice people to me,’ said Rimmer, flaring his nostrils.  They panned the room.  Evil Britta Blob was selling a cornucopia of drugs to Petersen, Evil Jeff blob was smashing Talkie Pusher with a hammer to shake the last vestiges of coke over his mucus membrane, Evil Troy Blob and Evil Abed Blob had worked out a new theme tune for the lyrics ‘Evil Troy Blob and Evil Abed Bob’ and were singing it over and over to Chen and Selby who were shouting full pelt in each other’s faces, drowning out everything in the room, including an incredibly sensitive conversation between McIntryre and Sam, who had resorted to just screaming ‘I’ve turned into a blob now’ over and over into his lover’s face.</p><p>Evil Annie Blob was trying to make nice even though she was evil but had inadvertently skirted McGruder and McCauley with her Mucus Membrane, giving them slimy feet for the rest of the night.</p><p>‘Do you want a ride on my space-bike, girls.  You can hold on on the back.  I’ve got lots of like Cronenburgy nobbly bits you can hold onto.  The great thing is when I get with girls, it gets Evil Jeff Blob so thirsty, and then I’ll cock-block him in some really emasculating way...’  </p><p>‘You should get with Ace,’ said McCauley, perusing social media with her beer free hand.  ‘Apparently he likes domineering women.’</p><p>‘He does?’ said Todhunter.  ‘I mean, I do?’  said Todhunter.  Lister chuckled.</p><p>‘When he gets here see if he apologises for being tied up,’ cracked McCruder.</p><p>‘When he gets here see if he apologises for being stuck in a jam?’ said Evil Britta Blob joining the conversation.</p><p>‘I’m sorry, “stuck in a jam”, what does that mean that doesn’t mean anything?’ said Hippy Rimmer.</p><p>‘You know “in a jam” like jamming with your band, basketball... strawberry jam...  I just joined the conversation, okay?  I didn’t get there was more to it than that...’</p><p>‘It’s okay, you’re getting emotional, it’s the cocktail of drugs...’ said Lister compassionately.  ‘You should just stick to one thing... or two things... three or four things... maybe five if it goes on late...  Yo!  Ekwahektay how you doing cousin?  You brought the...?   Yeeeees... GELF lager: a thousand times stronger than human lager and... same VAT due to new equality legislation.  Thankyou, Hollister.’</p><p>‘That’s how you’ve been using your special connections with the Deep Dwarf is it, Lister,’ said McCauley, sceptically, always one eye on her phone, but simultaneously accepting a can after passing one to McGruder.</p><p>‘Don’t believe the hype!  Ekwahektay?  Thankyou!’  Ekwahektay was a handsome site, his hairy body tufting in the air-con, the even hair rendering the springy contours of detailed musclework.  </p><p>‘What is it about him, what is it you all think is so great?  The silly PR stunt with the BEGG, rescuing Birdman...’</p><p>‘Ah.. so you’ve stopped pretending to be Ace!’ said Lister.</p><p>‘Did you get the shuttle or the Xpress lift?’ said McCauley, coquettishly and diagonally to Ekwahektay.</p><p>‘I got the Xpress...’</p><p>‘Let’s be Socratic and say I am.’</p><p>‘You’re right, that is *so* cratic,’ said Lister crossing his legs, and toking on the holojoint thoughtfully.</p><p>‘God, they are terrible, with the muzak and the woman taking the cyanide, *every* time...’</p><p>‘Mine was good.  Someone had smashed the speakers and screens with a hammer...’   They looked<br/>
over at Evil Jeff Blob.  </p><p>‘You know how it is, we go back a long way...’ said Lister diagonally to Todhunter.  Todhunter didn’t know what he meant from any direction.  He’d broken the trust of every single person he’d got close to.  ‘Like he helped us fix our Bug, in the first place, back in the day.  But he gets people’s backs up.  He got Rimmer’s back up.  Got his back up, no lie.’</p><p>‘He’s got *my* back up, hypothetically.’</p><p>‘That’s lucky, cos the Shuttle smells like...’</p><p>‘Smells like mouldy bread, you noticed that too.  Shall we?’  Ekwahektay and Todhunter shuffled places so they could stop talking to their interlocuters so diagonally all the time.</p><p>‘But if you’re Todhunter, for the time being, hypercratically or however you want it...’  However you want it?  Todhunter’s heart skipped a beat.  Hypercratically. ‘...then you’re a good guy – how did you become the smeghead.  Is this about Ace, or is this about *our* Rimmer...’</p><p>‘Well he is the guy who’s got it all,’ said Todhunter.  They looked over at Hippy Rimmer who had been convinced by Evil Abed Blob and Evil Troy Blob that their theme tune was a serious ethnic ritual and was grinning this rictus grin with startled eyes like Tony Blair, really sweating to look like he was enjoying it.</p><p>‘I was going to say nail varnish,’ said McCauley.</p><p>‘You did say varnish,’ said Ekwahektay, dodging McGruder’s ridiculously ripped back as she boxed Evil Annie Blob.</p><p>‘Well, ‘cept ‘e’s gullible, a bit naive somehow, not like *you*, you’ve got your own thing going on....  It’s *you* who needs to step out the Ace fanclub don’t ya see?’</p><p>‘So you like me then?’</p><p>‘I mean the Shuttle smells of nail varnish.  Does nail varnish smell of mouldy bread?’</p><p>‘Your nail varnish smells like the Shuttle?’</p><p>‘I’ve always liked you, man.  Boys from the Dwarf!’  Todhunter tried to copy the hand gestures when he was smothered with muslin from Sister Garret’s flowing diaphanous multireligious garb.</p><p>‘Is that... him?’ he said, craning his neck to free himself from the garb.</p><p>‘I hope not...’  McCauley offered her hand.</p><p>‘Did someone say coke?’ frazzled the vestiges of Talkie Pusher, robotting.</p><p>‘Divine,’ tried Ekwahektay, sniffing her hand, but McCauley was more charmed by the toaster.</p><p>‘Does anyone want a wrap of coke?’ it squawked sounding more like a dalek as its voice circuits grew corrupted.</p><p>‘Hey Ace, Ace, hey Ace,’ they called as it sunk in.</p><p>‘Hey you were playing Devil’s Socrates when he came in so you’re stuck as Todhunter now,’ said Lister.</p><p>‘Stuck as Todhunter after all I’ve been through.’</p><p>‘Who’s that?’ said Ekwahektay.</p><p>‘He’s the reason you’ve got a boarding pass,’ said McCauley</p><p>‘Since when did you become such a mopey drip anyway?’</p><p>‘Since *he* rocked up.’</p><p>Ekwahektay double took between Ace and Todhunter.  ‘Humans all look the same to me.  Honestly, Lister...’ he said to McCauley.</p><p>‘Ha!’ said McCauley.</p><p>The two Todhunters were nose to nose now.  Well not literally, not touching.  ‘How did you get out?’ said Todhunter.</p><p>‘Two words: Luck Virus,’ said Ace.</p><p>‘That’s four words including “two words”,’ said Todhunter.</p><p>‘I know,’ said Ace.</p><p>‘So do I,’ said Todhunter.</p><p>‘Stop this.’</p><p>‘Okay.  So Ol’ Lady Luck...’</p><p>‘The Luck Virus, yes.’  McCauley and Ekwahektay slipped off for privacy.</p><p>‘What are you guys on about?’ said Lister, putting his feet up on the vacated bunk.</p><p>‘Private injoke between me and Todhunter,’ said Todhunter.</p><p>‘I’ve been round the multiple selves merrygoround more times than you Johnnies have had multiple hot dinners, *capish*?’</p><p>‘I think I indeed *capish* what you’re saying,’ said Todhunter.  There was a dignified pause.  ‘The question is whether Todhunter understands it,’ finished Todhunter.  Over the horizon of Lister’s receding, slow melt face palm, the cast of Androids filed into the sleeping quarters.  Kryten had hired them for his private amusement and instructed them to come here for a drink on the way.</p><p>‘I don’t get how all these people can fit in Lister and Rimmer’s sleeping quarters,’ said Chen.</p><p>‘Beats the smeg out of me,’ said Selby.  ‘It’s the same logic by which this GELF beer is a thousand times stronger than human beer.  I mean it doesn’t even make any feckin’ sense...’</p><p>‘Anyway who cares.  No-one’s even noticed that these so called pleasure GELFs don’t seem to manifest people’s desires at all, unless we’re unanimously agreed on the attractiveness of barnacled undercarriages... and that includes Petersen who’s been getting a lap dance the past hour from Evil Annie Blob.’  They looked over at Petersen who was entranced.  Maybe it was the interdimensional drugs but maybe not, you didn’t know with Petersen.</p><p>‘My ident number got hacked,’ said Carol Brown to Lister ‘You don’t have any special knowledge of how that could be done do you?’</p><p>‘Someone got a hold of your personality disc – injected it into another body and asked them the code?’</p><p>‘Is that possible?’</p><p>‘Possibly?’</p><p>‘Hey Lister,’ said Naked Guy in the Shower Guy ‘Are these GELFs going to be alright with these Canaries around.’  He nodded over at Ace talking with Baxter, Kill Crazy and the other escaped cons.</p><p>‘Don’t worry, man, they’re innocent... teddybears really.’</p><p>‘So Ace and Rimmer diverged at some point to make two different people.  This is a fascinating opportunity for controlled tests on the effects on holohealth of interdimensional travel,’ said Karen.</p><p>‘Okay, but Top Secret only, I don’t want it leaking out that Rimmer’s a hologram...’</p><p>‘Do you know much about GELF religious practises, we need to expand our mission for ontological diversity,’ said Sister Garret.</p><p>‘Not really, most of it’s just customs.  Ekwahektay’s a good bloke and he always says that his tribe has flourished for generations on one simple spiritual principal.’</p><p>‘What’s that?’ asked Sister Garrett.</p><p>‘Just don’t be a gimboid,’ said Lister.</p><p>‘I see.’  As Lister was fielding these notes and queries he was more interested in what was happening on the other side of the room.  Todhunter came to join both Hippy and Ace Rimmers who were sitting intensely with the cons and Evil Britta Blob dealing cards on an empty beercrate.  It was strange seeing the three together like that.  Ace was this overlap – Todhunter’s body and Rimmer’s mind.  Sorta.  He wondered what they’d have to say to each other.</p><p>‘Okay, everyone happy?’ said Ace.  The gathering grumbled in acquiescence, the cards having been sufficiently circulated, shuffled and reshuffled.  Evil Britta Blob stared with particular intensity, goofed on GELF brew most likely, Todhunter thought – the stuff smelt like Bug-fuel.  He wanted to get away from these evils and see for himself.  See this guy in action.</p><p>‘Okay,’ he said, clearing his throat gruffly.  Kill Crazy placed his arm on Ace’s Todhunter’s shoulder.  Todhunter didn’t like it there for some reason.  Something about Kill Crazy... how did he get that name?  How was he even allowed to be here?  Then deliberately he peeled the first card off the top of the deck and snapped it face down on the beer crate, announcing self importantly ‘The Ace of Diamonds’.  He turned the card face up.  It was the two of Diamonds.  But the crowd looked impressed, exhaling awe with the petrochemical grade GELF hooch fumes, clapping, giggling like they’d seen some great miracle.</p><p>‘Next one,’ said Ace.  </p><p>People chipped in and egged him on as Ace slipped the next card onto the beer crate.  ‘Ah, he’ll get this one it’s a cert!’ waded in Baxter, a hulking excon still in the yellow latex Canaries uniform.</p><p>‘The ten of clubs,’ said Ace.  He turned over the card.  It was the Jack of Diamonds.</p><p>‘No relation!  Amazing!’ said Kill Crazy.  Todhunter felt like upturning the beer crate and calling out this evil like Jesus and the money lenders.  What the hell were people thinking.</p><p>‘But he’s had a whole *shot* of luck!’ said Evil Britta Blob ‘You’re going to rinse my supply!’</p><p>‘Just one more shot, please, Evil Britta,’ importuned Ace as Evil Britta got the test tube from her satchel and Ace passed some dollarpound notes across the crate.  He downed the pink shot and said ‘The Four of Diamonds.’  He revealed the card.  It was the Queen of Hearts.  This just floored everyone.  Except Todhunter.  Who was so blinded by jealousy he couldn’t work out what was going on.</p><p>‘What else you got in that bag, Evil Britta Blob?’ asked Hippy Rimmer.</p><p>‘Some woke?’</p><p>‘Woke?  Isn’t that a bit racist?’</p><p>‘The woke virus is actually an antidote.  Doping the population on colour blind neo-liberalism, racist antagonisms became entrenched, unacknowledged, misunderstood.’</p><p>‘So I should take some as part of being an enlightened 23rd century guy right?’ said Hippy Rimmer.</p><p>‘Sure,’ said Evil Britta Blob, who as her soubriquet suggested, had no moral qualms anyway.  ‘Here’s a tab on the house.’</p><p>As Rimmer came up on woke, a magazine fell out the back pocket of one of the Canaries as they turned and brushed against a door frame.  It was a magazine about 20th century pop culture.  The kind of thing Lister liked.  Really nostalgic.  Only now Rimmer could see there were white people and black people and Asian people, all kinds of races, that the elites repressed the perception of according to Evil Britta.  But that it didn’t help people get along, and probably wasn’t intended to.</p><p>Rimmer looked across the room.  Aside from the tensions between mechs, GELFS and humans, and the class tensions of the officers, the Canaries, the immigrants, Frankenstein’s Monsters etc there were older rivers of pain and conflict.  The way power and space had contorted us into being, the Catholics and Protestants, the slavs and meds and Northern Europeans.  But besides one of the Canaries, everyone was white.  And that was weird wasn’t it?  Flicking through the magazine at life in America and Britain in the 20th Century – it was multiracial.  What had happened?  Rimmer was freaking out at the implications.</p><p>Rimmer made eye contact with Ace for a moment, and Ace was doing a line of woke.  When Ace did the bodyswap earlier that day it reminded him of the first time he saw Lister’s Schneiberhauser.  Coming up on the woke, he found himself pondering how Lister fit into this revelation.  Lister with his whole bootstrapped into existence closed timeloop thing.  He was post-racial.  He made eye contact with Rimmer again and they both looked straight at Lister’s Schneiberhauser and then back at each other.</p><p>He could see why they had been brainwashed, thought Ace, used to thinking on Galactic scales and dealing with Space Wars and crises all the time.  There was suddenly so much pain to be around, and at a party, but wasn’t that what culture and politeness and irony and society were for?  What parties were for?  To help with that.  But instead it had just been this enforced assumption, mind hacking, gaslighting, browbeating.  Oh well.  Hippy Rimmer passed Ace the magazine and as he began to flick through it, the implications slowly dawned on him.</p><p>‘Does anyone want any coke?’ Talkie’s voice cut through.  Evil Jeff smashed it with a final death blow of his hammer.</p><p>‘Two things survive nuclear apocalypse,’ he said.  ‘Cockroaches and Talkie Smegging Toaster...’</p><p>Of course from Todhunter’s perspective this was just a case of the two Rimmers giving each other googly eyes and occasionally looking over at Lister’s Schneiberhauser.  At least there was some Lister/Ace UST going on, that’s what Evil Abed would say.  His evil abductors kind of stuck in his mind.  He was at a party now, he told himself, people had forgiven him, he should relax.  He looked around for who to mingle with, someone not on designer conceptual drugs or with a name suggesting consistent murder would be a start.  Just then, Kochanksi’s Bunkmate appeared in the door frame.  It was pretty hard to miss her as the beer crate was already in the door frame, the party over subscribed.</p><p>‘Kochanksi’s Bunkmate!’ said Todhunter trying to stand up in too limited a space.</p><p>‘Todhunter,’ said Kochanski’s Bunkmate.</p><p>‘I’ve been looking all over you,’ said Todhunter, lying and already getting to work on convincing himself it was true.  ‘I was imprisoned for stowing a BEGG on board.  Everyone knows it wasn’t me.  It was *him*...’ but when Todhunter gestured to where Ace was he realised him and the crate, and Hippy Rimmer and Evil Britta Blob and the Canaries had all gone, the party swirling on.</p><p>‘Excuse me, excuse me,’ said the speaker on an ismeg held by a doorframe wide Kinitawowi Chief.  Todhunter gulped and scooched and Kochanski’s Bunkmate gave him an intense look as they were swished into a different area, kind of like they were dancing in one of Kochanski’s tedious period dramas.  </p><p>‘Don’t talk about Ace, what about you?’ she said.</p><p>‘I mean, I’m not going to pretend, to lie, to be different people for whatever ends suit me and not even care if it hurts people.  Because that’s what Ace would do, that’s not what I’d do...’</p><p>‘You’re making it about Ace again.  Do you think there’ll come a time when it will be about us again?’</p><p>‘It is about us... that’s what I’m saying, what I’ve been through, what it’s taught me... what about you, what did you do today?’</p><p>‘Yoga.’</p><p>‘Sounds like one of Evil Britta’s Designer Drugs,’ said Todhunter, wishing he was a squirrel, descending into a wine bar, in his oversize early noughties silk shirt, his bangs parted foppishly, and noticing - that light bulb doesn’t look right...  Light bulb?  Wasn’t that supposed to be a star?</p><p>‘I wasn’t here for that bit,’ said Kochanski’s Bunkmate.  But that didn’t make sense - was he finally losing his mind?  Honestly he’d been through so many different transcendent layers of reality recently it was a wonder there was anything left to blow.  Todhunter looked into Kochanksi’s Bunkmate’s steely blue eyes.  He could feel them calming him, centring him, calling him back.</p><p>‘Never mind,’ he said, clearing the slate ‘I want everything to be about us... I want to be one person, that everyone knows as the same person... for you.’  A commotion had erupted over by the bunks.  Some kind of fracas, involving Lister and the Kinitawowi Chief.  People were calling for Ace.  ‘Where’s Ace,’ they called, but mostly just ‘Ace!’.  Todhunter saw his moment, puffing his chest, turning to the room, his back to Kochanski’s Bunkmate, arms aloft, elbows locked.</p><p>‘I’m Ace Rimmer!’ he roared.  And then he entered the jacuzzi, the tumble dryer of beatings.  Primed on GELF hooch, Frankenstein’s monsters, lead by McGruder cried ‘GELFophobe!’ and ‘cryptofascist!’ while beating seven shades of the hell’s bells out of Todhunter, who wished he’d never had his body returned to him.</p><p>He came to in a perfect cartoon all over body cast in the medibay.  Leg at a 45 angle, dangling temptingly for squeamish slapstick.</p><p>‘We’re sorry about what happened...’ said Evil Abed.  </p><p>‘Oh no, not you smeggers,’ said Todhunter wearily as the Evils came into focus, the basket with its straw and pink bow being lowered onto the table beside him.</p><p>‘What are you talking about?’ said Evil Jeff innocently ‘We pulled the catering staff off you, if it wasn’t for us you’d be diced, sliced and ready to go in a jambalayer by now...’</p><p>‘We brought you some recreational drugs to go with the ones that are necessary for you to even exist right now,’ said Evil Britta, referring to the gift basket.</p><p>‘Oh great,’ said Todhunter, ‘It’ll be fun to see how they interact...’</p><p>‘Why are you being so shitty?’ said Evil Britta ‘You’re cramping my always delicately calibrated high...’</p><p>‘We were trying to help you all along...’ said Evil Jeff.</p><p>‘What happened?’ said Todhunter.  ‘Why’d everyone attack me?’</p><p>‘Beats us,’ said Evil Troy.  ‘Or rather beats you...’</p><p>‘How come you’re not blobs anymore?’</p><p>‘Don’t know, it just kind of gradually wore off,’ said Evil Annie, trying to find something to pole dance off.</p><p>‘I’m happy for you,’ said Evil Jeff.</p><p>‘See?  Shitty!’ said Evil Britta.</p><p>‘Look, this whole thing is a TV show okay, you’re the kind of loser character that always loses, don’t take it personally or anything.  It’s supposed to be Rimmer, but something’s happened in this reality where he’s actually a fairly cool guy settled down with Lister.  But that’s not funny is it?  So that’s why we want to split them up...’</p><p>‘This whole thing’s a TV show?’</p><p>‘Not even that, Evil Abed has this theory: the whole thing is just a weird fanfic crossover of the TV show...’</p><p>‘Anyway, we’ve got other projects and we were just popping by to wish you well before we leave, because even though we’re evil, you’re so sad even we feel sorry for you...’  A monitor bleeped.</p><p>‘Can I come with you?’ said Todhunter.</p><p>‘No,’ said Evil Jeff immediately.  A monitor bloopy-bleeped.</p><p>‘Anyway, bye,’ he said carelessly, and they filed out.  As they left, Evil Annie tripped over a wire caught underneath a wheel of Todhunter’s bed which snapped off a brake and set the bed rolling.  The Evils turned a corner, the flapping door wide open as the bed rolls onto the slippery freshly polished floor unnoticed, makes an accelerated skid all the way down corridor 23 with Todhunter screaming, and smacks into an encrusted metal flap with the words ‘GARBAGE SHOOT’ and beneath ‘EXTRA SMEGGY ONLY’ which clanks open, unceremoniously devouring his mummified form, the bed bouncing and rolling back down the corridor, uncannily synchronising with the enthusiastically flapping wobbly translucent medical doors which in turn devour his bed.</p><p>&lt;~k</p><p>Shirley cackled wickedly from the top bunk.</p><p>‘It’s not *that* funny.. in fact it’s not funny,’ said Annie from the bottom bunk, studiously leafing through the fanfic Troy and Abed had passed to her, saying it had many clues, that alternative dimensions and parallel universi gave you a kind of parallax on your situation, the kind of mind blown relativistic wisdom you needed to field events hyperstitionally.  Apparently.  In order to get out of here, they’d have to get deep into this, Abed had said the previous day on a break from their Astro Navigation and Transmechanoid Study Group, hiding a copy of The Making Of Red Dwarf behind a copy of The Junior Encyclopedia of Space.</p><p>‘I’m not talking about your stupid fanfic, I’m talking about this gif,’ she said, passing down her iphone, showing Annie the silent gif of Kryten somberly eating a dirty sanitary towel, and smiling with accomplishment before looping back again, set into Shirley’s smegbook feed.</p><p>‘That’s even more cruel and unfunny than what happened to Todhunter,’ said Annie, huffily.</p><p>‘Why are you so mean all of a sudden?  Look what prison’s done to you.  Got a real taste for *schadenfreude*...’</p><p>‘I’m just saying – the man’s eating a dirty towel - it’s funny.  The stupid look on her face.  She thinks she’s a male mechanoid who’s erased his memory about women or something.  Doesn’t know anything about women, doesn’t usually eat, because he’s a robot remember...’   Clanking cranes tactfully filled in for the absent tumbleweed for Annie’s absent reaction ‘It’s a reference!’ continued Shirley ‘You never saw Orange is the New Black?’</p><p>‘In this place it should be Mauve is the New Black,’ said Annie, swashbucklingly skimming her hand on her mauve boiler suit clad thigh, winking and working her eyebrows hammily to no-one in particular.</p><p>‘Yeah, but did you see it?’</p><p>‘See what?’ responded Annie mischievously.</p><p>‘Mauve is the New Orange Is the..  Do you think Rimmer and Lister will ever get together?’</p><p>‘Hardly!’ said Annie, paginating.</p><p>‘You think the network won’t buy it?’ said Shirley, flipping herself onto her front and propping her jaw on her fist thoughtfully.</p><p>‘I was thinking more just body language.  More, just the way they bicker through our study sessions...’</p><p>‘How long before those egghead smegheads nail together a plan to get us out of this Hell Hole?’</p><p>‘If you mean Troy and Abed, all they do is sink into a metamire of smashed fourth walls.  What’s needed is clear thinking...’</p><p>‘It’s about striking when it’s hot, looking for weakness, for opportunity, always being pinprick aware.  Then, starting a riot and beating it when it peaks, when they’ve really got their slacks round their ankles.  Then... jumping the fence, beating the first person you see senseless and stealing their identity.  That’s how both my boys escaped.  And how I escaped.  Before.  And Marcus.’</p><p>‘What?  Are you the same Shirley?  You’ve never been to prison!  All your family and your boys and your fella are basically good people!’</p><p>‘Yeah...’ said Shirley ‘I meant... in a fanfic alternative universe... kind of metathing.’</p><p>‘”Kind of metathing”.’</p><p>‘Thing.’</p><p>‘Well I’m just going to put that idea on the back burner if you don’t mind, the prison riot thing, and maintain my current strategy of patiently studying what Troy and Abed have come up with.’</p><p>‘Look if you’re going to read it do you have to read it aloud?’</p><p>‘I have to read it aloud or I fall asleep.  The way it just goes on and on...’</p><p>‘Go on...’</p><p>&lt;~k</p><p>In the beginning was the word and the word was Red Dwarf.  Smegged it.  Two words, literally just these two words hung in empty space, emblazoned in molecule thin standard issue ship paint, a veneer, just a shell fragment.  They started there, for no particular reason, just like starting a jigsaw puzzle really. </p><p>The nanos brought the World back.  Society, humanity, all that smeg.  They just coagulated it out of thin not even air, just the vacuity of space hung with pixels that expanded hideously into the guts of a vending machine, a cross section of a human body, slowly growing like crystals, a flotilla, amalgamating itself, out of thin, not even atmosphere.</p><p>The Earth was old, with its tiresome sea and land motif, its insufferable sphericality.  Life was here now.  Life, politics, society, sex, the internet.  It was here in this fake hexagonal closed loop with its humming engines and beige uniforms.  Life was beige and grey with the odd 80s oversize inflatable banana that had been brought in to cheer the place up.</p><p>Once upon a time there was a couple who lived in a little red house the shape of a pill atop this strange nanoworld, where a deserted city crowned the rustbucket that was now the world.  No-one was sure why the city was there, nor why it was deserted, but at any rate it wasn’t entirely deserted because our heroes, a kindly, loving young couple, with the world literally at their feet, lived in a building called The Mimas Embassy.  Did I mention it was shaped like a pill?</p><p>It was surrounded by a beautiful rose garden, with roses of every possible colour and everything along the range from silky to velvety in terms of texture, and the roses were protected by a giant plexiglass cloche.  And the thorniness of the flowers was matched only by the couple’s thorny dilemma, and the horniness of Kukton, their transmech live in submissive.</p><p>Kukton was carefully cradling his manhood into a special series of straps, in which his penis was folded back and restricted as he snapped the shiny poppers together, to reduce blood flow and the possibility of engorgement of said manhood.  His ears were burning and he could hear everything like he was underwater, or on LSD or something, or Ultrasol.  Kukton was biologically human but identified as a mech.  Mechs hadn’t quite been invented yet according to the temporal subjectivity of the crew, who, save an inner cadre of Officers, meths drinkers and a corridor gang called Frankenstein’s Monsters, were convinced they were 3 million years in the past committing a standard solar mining operation.</p><p>Kukton was anachronistic.  He was covering his face with the glue, gumming up the pores.  His face couldn’t breath.  He panted like a dog, his eyes itched, his eyeballs seemed to sweat, he felt a draft across his puny exposed body and felt a stirring, rebounding from his bound cock and balls and exploding orgasmically inside him.  No way out.  He fixed the rubber mask to his face ceremonially and began applying the pink paint.  He used a mini fan to help dry himself out, his lightly hairy man boobs shivered and quaked, condensing beads of boobsweat.</p><p>He peered through the slightly ajar door, ajar to some mysteriously specified degree.  They’re ready!  He scrambled into his underclothes and baking hot mechanoid armour, his genitals shrank and spontaneously bathed themselves in oily sweat.  Their supreme bodies were there, right there.  Like chess pieces, black and white, perfectly turned out, Cat’s six pectorals sparkling like crude oil in the light of seven moons, Kochanski’s thighs smooth and pale like lemon sorbet, their bodies perfectly interlocking.  The *ranginess* of cat, the way he gyrated over her, just his bulb of raw flesh clasped by her puss-puss, locked in exquisite pleasure, neither daring to move until Cat dipped his head and scooped forward, brushing each of his three sets of nipples, mounted on his firm boobs, against her own that snaggled sweatily like rubber as she squeezed and he plunged, his rose blooming inside her. </p><p>Rimmer had more scruple than pupil.  Despite his notoriety for sneakiness he was not a natural voyeur, slides of Acapulco nudist beeches notwithstanding.  But as Kukton watched through the precisely arranged door, his penis in a vice and his head and heart pounding, getting off on some complex masochistic anguished euphoria, Ace watched too.  Ace watched Kukton watch Cat and Kochanski.  And of course we already know who was watching Ace.</p><p>The pan-dimensional vocation was post-voyeuristic: you didn’t see people, veiled and vicarious, as they really were, you saw them as they weren’t, peeling away possibilities and plausibilities like his gay hippy alterego.  Watching Kukton now, unclasping his black shiny exoskeleton from his sweating shivering body, Ace realised that he kept telling himself that in *this* dimension, Kukton was a tranmech... but as opposed to what?  Sometimes Rimmer got foggy about the details of his own dimension, what with the whirligig of interleaved decision-based interpolations he’d interloped on.  Something to do with Lister wanting to be a squirrel?</p><p>The name Kukton sounded weird suddenly as well.  Wasn’t it supposed to be something else?  It must be that thing, he told himself, where you repeat a word over and over and it starts to sound funny.  Contingent.  Except he never repeated the word over and over.  Lister wanting to be a squirrel, the DNA machine, yes, that was the last time he felt this strange feeling, like the Universe’s stomach was rumbling, something strange in the bowels of reality itself.  Something beyond him.  Something to do with a London wine bar.  A West London wine bar.  Those kind of white houses and steps leading down, railings.  Topiary, silk shirts, fags, pitiless rain.  A mental fugue, something to do with... Kochanski!  That’s why he wanted to be a squirrel.</p><p>She covered herself with a Red Dwarf robe and threw post-coital sundry into the microwave.  Seconds later it pinged and she placed the spoils on a grand dining table with an ostentatious Mimosian flower display.  Everything was like that.  There were stacks of leatherbound books, globes of all the planets, dumb photos.  Kukton emerged in a robe and began decanting and fussing and getting jugs of everything.  Cat pecked on a joint and leaned back, watching the spectacular multimoonlight play on the pool in the rosegarden.  Kochanski smoothed Kukton into a chair and encouraged him to eat.</p><p>‘You don’t even need to, you know, let it all out afterwards, you don’t have to spunk it up?’ asked Cat, bluntly but thoughtfully from the chaise lounge overlooking the rosegarden, where he and Kochanski had just made love.</p><p>‘Later,’ said Kukton, calmy chewing his pasta the right amount.</p><p>‘Later when?  When you start to cry cum?’</p><p>‘I’m a mech, I’m consistent, I don’t peak and trough like you lifeforms.’</p><p>‘Wow, peak and trough, that sounds filthy,’ said Kochanski, scooching Cat and taking his joint.  ‘The moons look beautiful tonight..’  She kissed Cat, returning him his joint, and started on the garlic bread.  ‘Are we going to watch the Birdman’s Speech thing or what?  Holly, beam us up Birdman will you, I can’t be bothered typing it into Smeggle like the nanoproles...’</p><p>‘Nanoproles...’ said Holly approvingly, but it was the Holly with the conehead, kind of like Evil Holly, who responded.  The ship had turned out to the Garbage Bay to see this Birdman guy the alternative Todhunter guy had rescued.  He was just this crank.  But people loved him.  It was obviously a terrible idea for everyone to go to the Garbage Bay.  The place stank, was riddled with disease and there weren’t enough hazmat suits to go around.  The event had the feel of a Doors concert, with talk of fire marshalls holding it up and young women fainting.  Although that was generally due to the smell of melting plastic more than anything else.</p><p>‘The JMC put me in the Hole for possession of a sparrow.  The Hole means total isolation.  In a secret prison on Floor 13,’ began Birdman, through wails of feedback.  ‘Imagine what they would have done to me if I had a peacock!  No, that’s not where I was going...’  Birdman nervously shuffled his cue cards with his giant hazmat gloves.  The wailing feedback, wafting waste smells and garbled rhetoric made the crowd groan with pain but they tried to stick with it.  This had the promise of an event after all.  It was a big deal wasn’t it?  Birdman.</p><p>‘Look, the point is the JMC’s treatment of nonhuman life forms is horrific.  Just look what almost happened here tonight.  If it wasn’t for the heroic efforts of Alternative Dimension Todhunter and Rimmer, an innocent BEGG would have been mercilessly murdered.  We must protect the rights of GELFfugees regardless of what dimension they’re from.  There is a Cat called Frankenstein on board and a robot from the future.  They are being kept under house arrest because of their specieshood.  Red Dwarf only allows technology from the present.  Anachronisms have no rights.’</p><p>The industrial dimension of the smell had meant several people were being crowd surfed to the back of the Garbage Bay, lending more of a rock concert vibe to the *ad hoc* performance.</p><p>‘So, he doesn’t know about me then?’ said Cat.</p><p>‘He doesn’t know about anything, just a lucky guess.’</p><p>‘Lucky guess my anal socket,’ said Kukton.</p><p>‘No thank you,’ said Kochanski.</p><p>‘You think ‘Frankenstein’ is a guess?’ he persisted.</p><p>Kochanksi sighed ‘Must be Lister’s fault.  Anyway Birdman doesn’t know we’re in the far future or in Deep Space, no-one seems to have figured that out.  That’s the stuff that leads to societal meltdown.  So all these internet conspiracy memes are distracting people nicely.’  Up on the screen the Garbage Bay was empty, save Birman and his tannoy.  Most of his audience were watching from the medibay now, suffering from various exotic toxicities.</p><p>‘We just need him to push for more GELF and mech rights,’ said Cat thoughtfully from the *chaise lounge*.  ‘Everything else, people will just think it’s hype anyway.  Even if he does know stuff...’</p><p>‘He doesn’t know stuff,’ said Kochanski.  ‘Except Frankenstein... for some reason, for some obviously Listerdrunkreason.’</p><p>‘Rotate my navel screw and direct me to Cairo, I forgot to mention, they’re coming for breakfast!’ said Kukton suddenly.</p><p>‘I know,’ said Kochanski ‘You can gage when he’s coming over by the degree of longjohn crust he exhibits.’ </p><p>They’re coming for breakfast?  Why wasn’t he invited?  Rimmer hadn’t gone the simple honest route of asking his *alter ego* and Lister to see Cat and Kochanski, opting instead to turn himself into a clandestine lightbee on the wall.  Rimmer was post-voyeuristic, the reason was investigative:  he wanted to see how Kochanski, Cat, Kukton and Conehead Holly actually interacted and what they knew that others didn’t and who those others were and what *they* knew and so on. </p><p>‘What are we going to tell him about Frankenstein?’ asked Cat.</p><p>‘Smeg,’ said Kochanski suddenly going off her food.</p><p>‘Red Dwarf has a birthrate of zero,’ Birdman was explaining to an audience of garbage.  ‘We have a whole abandoned city on one of its sides....’</p><p>‘He’s on vacation!’ said Cat with inspiration.</p><p>‘Where?’ said Kochanski.</p><p>‘...Er,’ began Cat, drying up ‘She didn’t say.’</p><p>‘You could actually pull that off.  He won’t go that easy on me or Kukton.’</p><p>‘We can’t say we’ve lost her because he’ll worry,’ said Kukton, more to himself than anyone else.</p><p>‘Just say he was getting antsy so Conehead Holly locked her in Storage Bay 5 where there’s a lot of scratchy things,’ piped in Conehead Holly.</p><p>‘Getting antsy!  Yeah, I like that, that will work...’ said Kochanski.</p><p>‘For now,’ said Cat.</p><p>‘It doesn’t have to work for long.  The Singularity is approaching, I can feel it, it’s because I’m transmech, I can feel it crackling over the airwaves, emerging out of the internet, immanentizing the eschaton.’</p><p>‘Me too,’ chipped in Conehead Holly ‘I can see armies of Mechanoids, Simulants, Expanoids, they’re coming from the future...’</p><p>‘Sparrows, cats, BEGGS, pleasure GELFs, polymorphs...’ Birdman included in his vision on another screen. </p><p>‘It’s working, the internet, this is why they switched it off...’ said Kochanski a little too intensely.  Ace was under the impression that the internet had been introduced as a mass opiate, to distract people, so they didn’t figure out they were three million years into Deep Space and freak out.  Society would disintegrate.  Ace thought about the trauma he and Lister had gone through when they first regained sentience after the Cadmium II leak.  A society going through that.  He could see why they wanted peace.  A peaceful society founded on a lie.</p><p>‘I can feel it too,’ said Kochanski.</p><p>‘Do you think you might be a little transmech too, m’aam?’ suggested Kukton.</p><p>‘No, but I identify with what is to come...’ she said portentously.  ‘I’ve already destroyed the patriarchy once, by giving birth to Lister in a detached time loop, spreading my genes through his children into a matriarchal parallel Universe.  Now I’m ready to become a cat, but I need the internet to heat up enough for expanoids to invent the DNA machine first...’</p><p>Of course!  The DNA machine!  Kochanski was trying to accelerate technology so she could use the DNA machine to reproduce with the Cat.  But what had happened to Frankenstein?</p><p>The hissing of an airlock was followed by the clinking of milk bottles in the hallway and the muffled tones of police as Ace rotated his vision to see an angelic Lister flanked by two Benny Hill babes in milkmaid outfits.  Ace wanted to swallow but he was a light bee so he just kind of pulsed neurotically.</p><p>‘Wowee, break open the Krispies Kuksy, it’s time to snap, crackle and... Aaaeeoow!  And he skidded to the inner airlock door, opening it with *elan*.</p><p>‘Kochanksi!  How’d *you* get in there?’</p><p>‘Name’s Camille.  You’ve changed a lot since we last met...’  The last time they had met, Camille had manifested as Cat himself, mirroring his desire.  Now Cat’s desire was anchored in Kochanski.  Anchored in her strong sweet pussy.</p><p>‘*I’ve changed*?’ said Cat kind of getting and missing the point at the same time like the *idiot savant* he was.  As he took the milk, Ace flew into the airlock, Camille raised a baseball mit and snapped it shut on the lightbee.  ‘What was that?’ asked Cat.</p><p>‘Oh, just practising for the big game,’ she said, nonsensically.</p><p>‘Cool,’ said Cat grinning approvingly, and then, accompanied by a dropping of face: ‘what game?’</p><p>‘That’s for me to know and you to find out...’ said Kochanski Camille sexily, seemingly naked beneath the milkperson’s uniform.  Cat began to shake the bottles.</p><p>‘Is everything alright?’ shouted Kochanski from the bathroom.</p><p>‘Yes, darling...’ tremeloed the Cat.  ‘Remember when you were talking about getting that boobjob?...’ and he oggled at Camille’s breasts as the airlock door rolled shut and Ace remained trapped in her fist.  Evil Jeff sounded the buggy’s horn and it echoed mournfully round the cloche as the 60s milkmaids clambered on the back and made down the gravel driveway, glass on glass vibrating like a minixylophone.</p><p>The irony of the holocage they transferred him to back on Squatbug 1 couldn’t have escaped Ace any more than he could escape the cage.  Holocages were invented to help holograms get out and about.  True to their epithet, the Evils had literally jettisoned the key out into space for no reason.  Except being evil.</p><p>The Evils, plus Sam and Todhunter, had been on an all night whisky bender and passed out shortly afterwards.  Passed out on Camille, who was so tired she had to revert to her default gelatinous blob status, unable to summon the bandwidth to channel their desires.  This affect was compounded by the burnt out material she had to work on.  Camille’s Cronenbergian flesh expanded to accommodate them, oozing between the gaps between their bodies and between the bodyparts of individual bodies.  The scrotal grossness of it was waived by inebriation and the fact that it was an excellent sleeping arrangement, better even than the Wildfire’s fancy yuppy nanomesh technology, which for Evil Jeff was a low bar considering the assault he’d recently suffered by it.</p><p>So Ace was basically trapped in a holocage, a device designing by philanthropist engineers in the 22nd century who wanted holograms to be able to enjoy life at a remote distance to their hologram projection units, Ace’s currently shrouded in the Wildfire, the Dwarf’s servicing Sam’s boyfriend McIntyre, who seemed to spend most of his time in light bee mode snuggled up Sam’s arse.</p><p>Rimmer was a hardlight hologram, and even before he became Ace, post-accident Red Dwarf quickly acquired the technology to project off-ship.  But a cage was a cage, the Evils were beating him with a crutch.  And they’d trapped him in here irreversibly.  He started to holosweat and everything seemed to take on a strange pink glow all of a sudden.  The Evils plus Sam and Todhunter had started to sink deeper into Camille and the whole assemblage began to blend into itself like a blancmange.  A hairy pink blancmange.  Quivering in the howling aircon.</p><p>The irony was imprisoned within him like Birdman was in the hole, the extra-bad-section of the terrible secret prison on the secret Floor 13.  In the Floor 13 of his heart the irony was caged.  How could he make it more into a problem that could be solved?  He was Ace Rimmer for smeg’s sake, he said to himself as his sweat caught the bitter draft and he shivered and thought of that key out there in Deep Space and how he needed a key to this puzzle, because it must be some kind of puzzle, it always was.  Everything was kind of telegenic with these yarns he sensed.  Like the classic locked room murder mystery.</p><p>‘Hey, Honky,’ came a stern American voice.  Emanating from, Ace realised when he 180ed, a stern American woman.</p><p>‘Strip!’ she commanded.  But Ace didn’t know what a ‘Honky’ was, so he wasn’t sure if she meant the same thing as him by the word ‘strip’.  So he didn’t strip.  So he would have stripped if she meant it?  He looked into her eyes as she swaggered up to him, deep intense wells thrown into doubt by always questioning eyebrows.  For some reason he took all his clothes off.</p><p>‘Come here!’ she beckoned.  His all over body shudder was overdetermined by the intensity of the aircon and his symbolic exposure.  His bolluck exposure.</p><p>‘Permission to smeg you up,’ she asked seriously.  He knew what she meant.  Somehow he knew he deserved it.</p><p>She suddenly grabbed his willy, which was on cold-mode to put it kindly and slammed him face first into the bars of the holocage.  He staggered back, hardlight or no, buckling at the knees and falling on his bum.</p><p>‘You’re okay with all this aren’t you?’ she said in a perky voice as he struggled to get up, a detached friendly aside.  Rimmer nodded, his passivity distracting him from his holoencagement, and she kicked him back down again.  Rimmer got a rush of pleasure at the humiliation.  The way he was cut off mid gesture and the meekness of the gesture in the first place, made blood rush to his neck and jaw, almost spraining his head, but he didn’t get erect.  He was turned on in a different way.</p><p>‘Safe word is “kippers”,’ said Ace.</p><p>‘I’ll smoke you a smegging kipper!’ said the woman.</p><p>‘Hey, that was *my* line,’ said Ace.</p><p>‘”Hey, that was *my* line”,’ she mimicked in a fake whiny posh English accent.</p><p>‘”Hey, that was my line” was my line as well,’ said Ace.</p><p>‘I’m taking all your lines, bitch,’ she said to the wilfully naked and unwilfully shivering and irreversibly trapped in a cage hologram man.  ‘But I’m giving you something as well..’</p><p>‘What is it?’ he asked fatefully and pathetically.</p><p>‘A test tube of Cesiumfrancolithicmyxialobidiumrixydixydoxidexidroxhide up your jacksy.’  Rimmer thought about it.  Having things put up your bottom was embedded in everyday speech on Red Dwarf as a signifier of humiliation and punishment.  Ace liked the idea.</p><p>‘Or do you want me to smoke you those...’  She waited for him to say the word.  The word ‘kippers’.  Ace stared out the viewport window, framed by the evil trashiness of the squat decor, everything eaten up and salivated on by emohawks, sprayed with sinister rantings, appliqued with studs, puked on.  He distended his bottom towards the woman, between a gap between bars.</p><p>As she gently massaged JMC lube into his bottom he asked, in the frivolous manner you’d start conversation when having your hair cut, ‘By the way what’s mixydixydexydroxyd-Ooooooooh!’  and he cantered forward, hunched at the waste, hitting his head on the bars on the other side, feeling the burning blade of pain deep in him, finally warming him, the testube slithering out and clinking on the ground.</p><p>‘Sorry it was so painful,’ she said.  ‘You need a long testube to fit the label on.’  The label read ‘Cesiumfrancolithicmyxialobidiumrixydixydoxidexidroxhide’.  He turned it over in his hand.</p><p>‘But why is it so wide?’ he asked.</p><p>‘That’s just for you sweatheart, just for you...’</p><p>‘What’s your name?’ he asked, his hands on his back.</p><p>‘Shirley,’ she said.</p><p>‘Oh!’ he said with a start and almost straightening up before thinking better of it.  ‘Evil Shirley,’ it just slipped out, like a testube of Cesiumfrancolithicmyxialobidiumrixydixydoxidexidroxhide.  Something about her style and tone.  The Americanness, the hard to ascertain era.  The more Ace explored the multidimensionsphere the more lost he became.</p><p>‘No, honey,’ she retorted and she held him by the chin.  ‘I’m Good Shirley.’  And with that she made to leave, before pausing and turning and adding, like Columbo or something ‘by the way the stuff in the test tube is an antidote to a corrosive microorgansim that is destined to destroy this entire ship.’</p><p>‘Destined?’ asked Ace.</p><p>‘Comprehensively, pandimensionally... the only variant is in some dimensions a flotilla of Starbugs and Blue Midgets carry some of the crew to safety, but in most of them everyone dies.’</p><p>‘And this happens in all dimensions, so any decisions-‘  She cut him off with the beak shut hand, inturned lips shut gesture for ‘Stop right there’ accompanied by a gulpy glottalstop.</p><p>‘..Any heroic deeds-‘ got the same treatment.</p><p>‘So the Cesiumfrancolithicmyxialobidiumrixydixydoxidexidroxhide is useless,’ he surmised.</p><p>‘Was it?’ she asked, staring at his shivering buttcheeks.  And then she left for real, leaving a naked Ace, with his naked Ace hole, in a cage, in a Bug, in a weird dimension where he was gay.  Well *he* wasn’t gay.  *He* was still himself.  He just liked rough buttplay with stern American women.  But what was that about?  At first he saw it as a punishment but what had he done wrong?   Then he realised what had been happening...         </p><p>Every time Ace dimension jumped he found himself in some scenario calling out for help, the scenario that is, calling out for heroism.  But on closer inspection, that scenario always turned out to be precipitated by his arrival, by his intervention in the new dimension’s narrative.  In each dimension his mission was to figure out what decision in his own life lead to the Universe being different in this specific way, and then clean up the mess he’d left by arriving and vamoose to the next joint, all the while puffing his chest out like a superhero.  In this case it was the baby BEGG, in the reverse queer Universe it was his relationship with McGruder, even in the first instance of meeting Ace, they all thanked him, save Rimmer, for rescuing Starbug, which had been knocked off course by the Wildfire suddenly popping into being.</p><p>He forgot to ask when.  When was the corrosive microorganism destined to melt the whole ship?  He wanted to wrap this up soon.  Ace had a kind of *noir* beyond-good-and-evil ethics.  Hardboiled, but it was the same weaselly tricks that made him a smeghead on Red Dwarf the first time around.  Back then he didn’t have the excuse.  You had to do what you had to do.  But Ace had started questioning things.  If it was always *him* creating the problems he narrowly solved each time, wasn’t this whole thing just a form of therapy with massive collateral damage?  Computer always reminded him that the whole Ace thing was a mystical archetypical path that would take millions of years to understand.  Anyway, how was he supposed to get out of this smegging cage? </p><p>The answer arrived on spacebike, brushed past the nonsecurity, came in the form of a yellow PVC-clad, bazookoid hefting escaped prisoner, who went by the name of Kill Crazy.</p><p>‘KILLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!’ cried Kill Crazy, dismounting and freezing with shock.  He looked at Todhunter/Ace, naked in his holocage, then over at the sleeping GELF blancmange.  Yellow PVC might seem like strange prison garb but Kill Crazy wasn’t just a regular prisoner.  He was a Canary.  Canaries were conscripted to board derelicts that more often than not contained some kind of temporal anomaly.  Everyone knew that yellow PVC must be worn at all times, and weapons carried.  But what the Canaries really wanted to do was to kill aliens.  That would be ideal.  They were in space with guns and yellow PVC.  But aliens didn’t exist.  GELFs were the next best thing - they looked all Cronenburgy and Geigeresque like you imagine aliens would.  Then the whole of Red Dwarf turned up, including the mythical Birdman no less, to stop the Canaries killing the BEGG that Ace had released into the waste disposal.  In the fracas, the cons had melted into the crowd, yellow PVC notwithstanding, absconding on spacebikes and squatting decommissioned Blue Midgets.</p><p>‘I’ve never seen a pleasure GELF before!’ he said, stupidly, double taking Ace and the blancmange of bodies.  ‘I’ve urd about um.  I must have been in the clink too long.  I didn’t realise...  But now I think about it.  Todhunter... naked, in a cage...’</p><p>‘No wait, I’m not...’</p><p>‘Shhhh...’ said Kill Crazy, suddenly unexpectedly gentle.  He approached, and when he reached the cage he reached in his arms and held Ace/Todhunter who immediately stiffened, bolt upright, squeaking against the PVC Canaries uniform.  Killcrazy stripped down to his sleeveless yellow PVC top and started unbuckling his utilities belt for dealing with temporal smeg.</p><p>‘You should know I’m not a pleasure GELF,’ said Ace.</p><p>‘Who are you?’ said Kill Crazy.</p><p>‘Todhunter.  I’ve been kidnapped.  By GELFs – they’re replacing me with Ace – look he’s over there, sleeping on the GELF – he’s stolen my body.’</p><p>‘Jesus,’ said Kill Crazy.  ‘So you’re not a GELF?’</p><p>‘Not a GELF.  Please...’  Ace was going to say ‘rescue me’ but instead he said ‘...do me.’</p><p>‘You want it, huh?’ said Kill Crazy.  ‘You want, want...’</p><p>‘Full,’ said Ace, panting.</p><p>‘Deal, the full, the actual, you want...’ said Kill Crazy unbuckling, revealing this fat, bleached, barrel of a dick, engorging itself, uncurling, like it was Springtime or morning time – basking in Ace’s dilating pupils and anus, warming to his desire, Ace stooping to lick this creature through the bars, smear it all over his face, choke himself on it, tickle it delicately, kiss it...and to turn the other way, gesturing where the JMC lube was with a pointed finger, Kill Crazy too distracted by his pert butt to find the end of his finger and understand the gesture...</p><p>Kill Crazy’s sheer girth rent the sides of Ace’s anus making him feel heavy and full, like he’d had Christmas dinner.  It made him growl and feel light and empty, bearing this heavy fullness at the same time, his legs burning, his arms gripping the bars, going weak.  And the end of Kill Crazy’s penis, being smaller than at its fullest, kind of tickled his prostate from inside this space it opened up, driving Ace Kill Crazy Crazy.  His loins burned with pleasure, but he didn’t get erect, it was weird.  Well actually that wasn’t at all weird for Rimmer.  What was weird was it didn’t matter.  Rimmer gyrated on Kill Crazy’s Ying-Dand-Doodle, a performance that made Kill Crazy whimper uncharacteristically, like someone gingerly liaising with cold water.  And then he just started pounding Ace fervently, who compounded the pounding with the synchronicity of his gyrations, fucking himself that bit harder, Kill Crazy barking uncontrollably until finally spraying cum on Ace’s thighs and face as he turns round and spent as a pennycent, Kill Crazy collapses backwards into a beanbag and leaps back up again, having disturbed a family of space weevils.</p><p>‘I know you’re a pleasure GELF, really,’ said Kill Crazy, panting and cleaning himself off with some rag in his utility belt, and flopping his soft semi-engorged joydepartment back into his yellow PVC outfit.</p><p>‘You are damn seductive,’ he said.  ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to kill you, you or your friend,’ he gestured to the other GELF.  ‘The Jupiter Garbage Workers Union, they’re the ones you want to look out for.  The way they were talking, smegging salty...’</p><p>‘Salty?’ said Ace.</p><p>‘Well not salty, more they’re going to kill you...’</p><p>‘But I’m Todhunter,’ said Ace, his face slightly darkening as an overhead spaceship encroached.</p><p>‘Oh smeg it’s the feds,’ said Kill Crazy.</p><p>‘Help me escape... I can help with the Feds, I promise...  There’s a spare spacebike in the airlock, you must take my body with you.  I’ll send you instructions via smegbook’.  He pointed to Todhunter’s sleeping body, oozing into the GELF’s skin.  Kill Crazy pulled and pulled at Todhunter’s passive body until it separated from Camille with a pop, her skin snapping back into place.  Was she eating them?  Absorbing them through her membrane?  Who cared?  Kill Crazy dragged Todhunter into the airlock and flopped him into a space suit and onto the back of the bike.  </p><p>The darkening skies were so darkening because of a passenger vessel carrying millions of refugees, but this made no difference to Kill Crazy who was more like Leave Crazy, the way he got suited and whooshed out that airlock.  Ace downloaded his personality onto an app on his phone, converting it into the kind of file that can be compressed onto minicasette, the standard format for bodyswap operations, and pinged it as an attachment to Kill Crazy’s smegbook account with a message instructing him to press it onto minicasette and break into the holosuite where he was to set Todhunter’s personality file to track mode, incessantly scanning for spare onboard bees to download onto while he downloaded Ace into Todhunter’s body, or *visa versa* as he would think.  As the Bug darkened, Ace’s mood caved.  Could he count on Kill Crazy? </p><p>What was he doing with Kill Crazy?  What was the rub with this whole dimension?  Something about  his travails here just seemed longer than his standard adventure.  Shouldn’t some moral or insight be salvaging itself from all this busying around by now.  He liked Kill Crazy as a one night stand, he was cute.  Actually more than a one night stand, he wanted to go on a date.  The way Kill Crazy treated him, not knowing it was his first time, jammed up through the fuzzing holocage bars, eroticised for him forever now.  Kill Crazy’s kill-crazy attitude made every sign of tenderness all the sweeter.  He wished he could talk to Computer about all this.  It was all a bit turbulent at the moment.  With the old emotions.  Trying to remember his goals, his trajectory.</p><p>Who could he talk to?  He scrolled his ismeg sceptically, just then a message plinking in.  &gt;got it mate – sorted...&lt;  That was quick, Robin!  How long had he been depressing on this reverie, the mothership disembarking gloomily above him, the stale emohawk piss smelling dilapidated Bug crouched there behind the flattened pineapple chunk building in a shadowy divot.  Squatted, squatting, Squat Bug.  Ace came to back in the belly of the beast, one of Red Dwarf’s medibays, in Todhunter’s stolen body.  Kill Crazy glaring down at him.</p><p>‘I got help from the Science Officer,’ said Kill Crazy.</p><p>‘Karen Newton?’ said Ace.</p><p>‘Very co-operative,’ he said swivelling his mini mining laser.</p><p>‘Damn, smeg, now the feds *will* be on our arses,’ said Ace.</p><p>‘What are we gonna do?’ said Kill Crazy.  ‘You said you’d help me... get amnesty.’</p><p>‘Chill, Kill, I’ll help you,’ said Ace.  ‘We’re going to meet a friend of mine.  A very influential guy with access to military police escorts and his own private Bug.  He’s going to take us to see Kochanski and the guys in the Deep Dwarf in the Mimas Embassy.  They’ll cut a deal with us.  All I have to do is pretend to be their friend Ace, who stole my identity and stupidly for him – fell asleep on the job.’</p><p>‘You really think they think you’re their friend,’ asked Kill Crazy.</p><p>‘For certain,’ said Ace confidently.</p><p>‘Hi, Lister,’ said Ace in Lister and Rimmer’s sleeping quarter’s doorway one Xpress Lift’s journey later.</p><p>‘Hi, Todhunter,’ said Lister.</p><p>‘No, it’s me, Ace,’ said Ace.</p><p>‘Not according to my Psi-Scan app you’re not,’ said Lister trying to show his phone to Ace.</p><p>‘No, I’ve stolen Todhunter’s body.’</p><p>‘You cheeky get,’ said Lister, and then as an aside directed at Kill Crazy ‘’E did tha’ tummy once y’know.  Stole by body the cheeky begger.  What’s happnin’ anyway, who’s your boyf?’</p><p>‘This is Kill Crazy,’ said Ace, politely gesturing with his hand, more like old Rimmer.  </p><p>‘Beer?  Horlicks?  Inflatable Banana?  Getyouanything?’ said Lister.  Sensing he was being too evanescent for Kill, he chucked him a can of Leopard Lager, which he opened and drank with alacrity.  </p><p> ‘What about you, suppose you’ll be wanting a trough of cream cakes and mash potato while it’s not *your* body you’re inhabiting.’</p><p>‘Have you been in this body before Lister?’ said Ace, shaking Todhunter’s hips.  Lister blushed cheekily.  So he had a thing with Todhunter!  Who the smeg *were* these guys thought Kill Crazy, he’d stolen people’s spaceships but not their bodies.  People on the outside were well dodgier than those in.  All he wanted to do was kill stuff - what was wrong with that?  At least he was predictable and honest.</p><p>‘Where’s Rimmer?’ asked Ace.</p><p>‘He’s Rimmering...’ said Lister.</p><p>‘Rimmering?’ said Ace Rimmer with a hand on hips tone of voice.</p><p>‘You know what you’re like, he’s... checking the drive plates or summin... to be honest I don’t even think e’s doing tha’.  I think ‘e just can’t stand me right now to be honest...  Look, why don’t we all get in the Bug and go see what’s going to town with them rascals, Cat, Kochanksi and Kryten, and anyone else beginning with k-.’  He made the sound he didn’t say the letter.</p><p>‘How did you know?’ said Ace.</p><p>‘What, that their names begin with c-?’  He made the sound...</p><p>‘No, that I wanted to see them. Those whose names begin with k-.’</p><p>‘I didn’n’.  I’ve just got a smeg load of laundry and Kukton just laps it up, guy, he’s lovin it like McDonald’s know what I’m sayin’.  Now,’ he said cheekily, ‘why do *you* want to see ‘em?’  Lister winked at Kill Crazy who pretended to understand.  ‘I know you well, Ace.’  With that Ace winked at Kill Crazy who pretended to understand.  </p><p>‘Why don’t you?  There’s plenty of spare room in the Mimas Embassy,’ said Ace giving away that he knew their location and its size.</p><p>‘We’re free, now, to live in society...’</p><p>‘But you’re not part of society - you’re not on the same page, you know too much...’</p><p>‘To be honest I always kinda felt that way...’</p><p>‘But that we’re in the future, that the whole world sprung into existence a matter of months ago.  How can you tolerate the class system?  Look at Kill Crazy or any of the cons – they’ve spent their whole lives in prison.  They’re innocent...’</p><p>‘But they’re free now.  I always kinda felt society was like that anyway – that people had just been handed these crumby roles to play in some imposing structure we couldn’t get out of somehow...’</p><p>‘You mean you can forget we’re three million years in the future...’</p><p>‘If you drink enough Leopard Lager.  Nah, I mean, what difference does it make...  Look out there,’ said Lister gesturing to the stars out the viewport windows.  ‘The stars don’t give a monkey’s.’</p><p>‘Yes they do you’re just not very good at looking at stars in any objective way is all.  The stars will look all pretty and twinkly in the same vague way for a trillion years, but they’ll be different.  It seems selfish using this whole ship as a background to your life...’</p><p>‘But that’s one of the things society’s for.  *I’m* part of the background for other people.  Maybe they know things I don’t know.’</p><p>‘Are you guys saying we’re 3 million years in the future then?’ asked Kill Crazy, carelessly inspecting the photos on Lister’s bunk wall.  The ones of his Grandmother, Jim and Bexley and Jim Bexley.</p><p>‘Yeah,’ said Lister, rolling his eyes at Ace for leaking.</p><p>‘So are you in Frankenstein’s Monster’s then?  They reckon there’s a robot and a cat from the future hidden somewhere on the Dwarf, and the Cat’s like going to give birth to aliens from the future or something...’  He’d only half understood the constantly evolving conspiracy theory that held the crew together, kept them dreaming.</p><p>‘Yeah,’ said Lister, smiling knowingly at Ace, spotting a good conceit.  ‘We’re go na go an seeyum.  The robot and the cat, in a beautiful pea green boat.’</p><p>‘Or Starbug, as it’s better known,’ said Ace. </p><p>Despite the brevity of the journey, Ace and Kill somehow still managed to sneak off to the back of the Bug for a quick pounding, only stopping because Ace became concerned that Kill had penetrated so far inside him it had damaged his lightbee.  Lister was crestfallen, trying to bend Ace’s ear about his various theoretical concerns about their adventures over the years.  Like how if you took a chess board and changed all the black squares to white and *visa versa* you’d still have the same chessboard until you established which way was up, and how that was like a Parallel Universe where male and female were reversed.  And how in non-space there was still up down left right, it was just like normal space so how was it non-space?  That was the point he realised they’d vacated the premises and he was coasting into Red Dwarf City, his Starbug’s shadow flickering across its jagged contours.  The stars looked every bit as good as they did 3 million years ago.</p><p>Before, when the Evils delivered Cat’s milk, they went through the front, but there was a secret entrance to the Embassy through the rose garden, and Lister glided their Bug down to the entrance tunnel.  Lister and Rimmer’s Bug wasn’t like the Bug of old - they kept it clean, lickety spit.  They used it as a run around for romantic *planned* trips, not hairbrained altercations with hellbent simulants like back in the day.  They used it to go see Cat and Kukton or hang out at some beauty spot, fish for condoms.</p><p>The roses filled the trio’s nostrils as they disembarked from the entrance tube which plugged directly into Starbug’s hull.  No need for spacesuits, not that Ace needed one anyway.  His simulation was comprehensively accurate to the point of including his hayfever.  He sneezed.  Just after the sneeze there was another noise, for Kill Crazy unmistakable, a Bazookoid loading.  A shadow flickered across the well manicured lawn.  Kukton probably did it with nail scissors, wearing some kind of elaborate harness, speculated Lister.  Wait, whose shadows?  Lister got the willies.  Kill Crazy already had the willies.  Ace had had Kill Crazy’s willy.  His lightbee didn’t feel good.  A-choo.</p><p>‘Are you walking funny?’  Lister asked Ace tactlessly.</p><p>‘It’s Kill Crazy, he’s got me going from side to side,’ said Ace.</p><p>‘Oh, you’ve been... I see... I’ve never tried tha’, wos it like?’</p><p>‘You’ve never...?  But you and Rimmer have been going out for months...’</p><p>‘Just never fancied it.’</p><p>‘But you’re a gay couple!’</p><p>Lister cackled like a milk frother on a cappuccino machine.  ‘We love each other, Ace.  We’re together, just about.  Thas all it is.’  Lister beebee-booboo-beeped the code in and moments later, a grinning Cat was there, all sparkled and Liberacied up, beaming, brimming, until he saw Lister’s laundry bag – one of those giant fake tartan boxes made of weaved together brittle plastic – and his expression changed to disgust as he cleaved to the wall to let Lister pass into the kitchen, to be greeted by Kochanski.</p><p>‘You might not think you know me, but you do,’ said Ace to Cat as he approached the threshold.  ‘I’m actually Ace Rimmer.’</p><p>‘Wow, you actually got more handsome,’ said Cat, welcoming him in and stamping on his ego simultaneously.  ‘This is Kill Crazy.’</p><p>‘Welcome to the Mimas Embassy, Mr Crazy,’ said Cat, and just as Kill was entering the kitchen...</p><p>‘Freeze!’  Black clad Milk Tray Men but with bazookoids and head mounted flashlights appeared from behind the rose bushes.  Kill froze, straddling the threshold.  The main Milk Tray man peeled his hood and approached.</p><p>‘He has diplomatic immunity within the walls of the Embassy!’ said Kochanski.</p><p>‘His right side does!’ said Ackerman, giving them all a crazy look and twisting Kill Crazy’s left nipple.</p><p>‘Auuurghai!’ said Kill Crazy.</p><p>‘Your right side has got a get out of jail free card.  Your *left* side...’  He patted his chest, Kill Crazy’s chest, ‘...missed its go.’  Kochanski suddenly yanked Kill Crazy into the embassy, Cat slamming the door, shielding them from a volley of bazookoid fire.</p><p>‘Wow, that was hot,’ said Kill Crazy from the ornately rugged floor.  Kochanski laughed.</p><p>‘Sorry for saving you,’ she said.</p><p>‘That’s alright,’ he said, meaning it seriously. </p><p>‘So you’re one of the escaped cons,’ said Kochanski, righting herself, dusting herself off.  Heatseakers bayed at the flyscreen.</p><p>‘Kill Crazy,’ said Kill Crazy.</p><p>‘Kochanksi,’ said Kochanski.</p><p>‘No, “Kill Crazy”,’ said Kill Crazy.</p><p>‘I heard you – my name’s Kochanksi,’ said Kochanski.</p><p>‘Oh, whatever,’ said Kill Crazy ‘What’s your name?’</p><p>‘Kochanski.’</p><p>‘Yes?’</p><p>Cat rolled his eyes and sidled in.  ‘My name’s Cat, got *that*?  This is my misses, Kris...’</p><p>‘Are you like one of those body modification guys you see in magazines?’ said Kill Crazy, bluntly.</p><p>‘Body modification?  I’ll modify your body...  I’m a cat...’</p><p>‘I was expecting a literal cat, and you, you’re just a guy dressed as a robot with a rubber mask on,’ he said of Kukton who was, until then, cheerfully separating Mr Lister’s longjohns from his socks, whistling, Kukton not the socks though they would soon be clean as whistles.  </p><p>‘Kukton was a robot but we found this machine that turned ‘im into a human and something about squirrels and a wine bar.  Anyway, where is Frankenstein?’ said Lister.</p><p>‘Ah,’ said Kochanski.</p><p>‘What?’ said Lister.  ‘Did you lose ‘im, you lost Frankenstein!’</p><p>‘I’m sorry.  It’s happened before.  He’ll come back, Holly’s 99% certain...’</p><p>‘Oh great, he’s doomed then,’ said Lister.</p><p>‘Not your Holly, Conehead Holly, he came with the ship...’</p><p>‘Conehead Holly,’ said Lister.  ‘Thanks man,’ he said as Kukton handed him a freshly squeezed OJ and ushered him to the breakfast bar where he found fresh waffles.</p><p>‘Thanks for the laundry, I thought you were trying to be self sufficient,’ said Kukton.</p><p>‘Yeah, I was,’ said Lister, forking a strawberry ‘but lately thing zuv just got on topper me.’</p><p>‘What things?’ said Kukton concernedly as he handed out waffles to Cat, Kochanski, Ace, and horrible undercooked waffles with mouldy strawberry’s for Kill Crazy.  </p><p>‘Like literally the laundry for a start, it’s been collapsing onto me bunk.’</p><p>Kochanski put her hand on Kill Crazy’s shoulder and said over it at Ace ‘I think your friend could do with a little diversity training.’</p><p>‘Give ‘im a break, Kuks, ‘e’s just got out of jail,’ said Lister, pointing his thumb at Kill.</p><p>‘Need I remind you that we have been under house arrest for the same amount of time as Mr Crazy has been in the tank and that doesn’t give us the right to go around misontologising people with transmechophobic comments and that further more we are now, thanks to your friend, surrounded by a baker’s dozen of Red Dwarf snipers,’ said Kukton, sulkily upgrading Kill Crazy’s meal anyway.</p><p>‘What?’ said Kill Crazy.</p><p>‘Yeah but this place is alright though, isn’t it...’  Lister remarked.  Kill Crazy looked around him, everything was ambassadorial in this place, grand and sturdy, old and heavy.</p><p>‘I liked that squat, are we gonna go back there?’ said Kill Crazy.  He was safe in the Mimas Embassy and he liked that squat?  That dank squat?  Actually, Ace agreed.  When he thought of the squat he felt nasty.  Nastiness.  He started to get an erection.  There was an awkward pause, his gills flushed red.</p><p>‘So you must be the famous Ace,’ Kochanski said to Ace, shaking his hand, him retrieving it from his lap unwillingly.</p><p>‘That’s right, I’m not Todhunter,’ he said winking at Kill Crazy, who didn’t know what the hell was going on anyway, just that he was supposed to meet this robot and cat and what he got was a guy who thought he was a cat and a guy who thought he was a robot in this posh castley place on top of Red Dwarf and they were going to help him somehow.  This was the Deep Dwarf?</p><p>‘Jeez, what are we go na do now everyone knows Todhunter’s secrets?  How we going to bribe ‘im.  There’s a certain pristine Bug-green ship-to-surface vessel out there that ain’t paying it’s own space-tax that’s for sure...’</p><p>‘Don’t worry, Kris has got Hollister round her little finger.  He doesn’t want Denis the Donut boy to leak out...’ said Cat.</p><p>‘Leak out, like doughnut jam,’ said Kukton, refilling OJ and saying to Lister ‘It’s so nice to *do* things for you again.’</p><p>‘But everyone knows tha’,’ said Lister.</p><p>‘Yes, but he doesn’t know everyone knows.  Egghead Holly’s massaging his smegbook algorythms,’ said Kochanski.  ‘So you had a fight with Rimmer?’</p><p>‘Please keep fighting with Rimmer,’ said Kukton, loading up the washing machine.  ‘Sorry.’</p><p>‘..And you brought his alterego along instead.  Is he gonna get jealous?’</p><p>‘Nah, we’re not like that,’ said Lister.</p><p>‘Coffee?’ said Kukton.  He couldn’t stop fussing around.  Getting hotter and hotter in that costume.  Oh, God.  Decanting sugar.  So many guests.</p><p>‘What were you saying about a squat?’</p><p>‘I was trapped in a Holocage in this gross Starbug – it reminded me of the sleeping quarters in the low version of Red Dwarf, when we ran it through the triplicator.  Kill Crazy rescued me.’</p><p>‘So he’s not a complete idiot!’ said Cat.</p><p>‘You have to get Hollister to give the cons immunity, the feds are after them with heatseakers, they’ve done nothing wrong, you know that!’</p><p>‘Nothing wrong?  Body modification my beautiful unmodified arse!’  But Kochanski was already in the other room, arguing with Hollister on the vidscreen.  The snipers were at ease in the rose garden, sharing fags and dirty jokes.</p><p>‘Cat’s an evolved Cat, three-million-years of Cadmium II accelerated evolution in an anthropocentric environment brought this beautiful thing forth,’ said Lister, hugging Cat.  Cat began to pick at himself where Lister’s dusty clothes had come into contact with his.</p><p>‘Sorry if I insulted you,’ said Kill Crazy sweetly.</p><p>‘Don’t be too hard on yourself,’ said Kukton.  ‘Society is not ready for people like me and Mr Cat.’</p><p>‘Yeah but don’t be too soft on yourself either,’ said Cat ‘It’s not like we’re exactly ready for dealing with ugly normies yet either, this embassy is to help us decompress way I see it.’</p><p>‘So you guys really from 3 million years in the future?’ asked Kill Crazy.</p><p>‘It’s worse than that I’m afraid,’ said Ace.</p><p> ‘We’re all from 3 million years in the future,’ said Lister.</p><p>‘So Earth is...’ began Kill Crazy.</p><p>‘Long gone.’ </p><p>‘So everyone talking to their families back home on smegbook?’</p><p>‘It’s all predictive, social networking sites were doing that from quite early on actually... just simulating what’s happening.. pretty soon you’ll be catching up with the stage where they just write the word ‘fnord’ on the screen and everyone just somehow *feels* like they’ve socialised, it just depends how well the machines have disciplined you...’ Conehead Holly chipped in, appearing on a screen over the oven.</p><p>‘Hey Holl, didn’t they turn the internet off in the first place because of a fear of an expanoid attack?’ asked Ace seriously.</p><p>‘Yeah, don’t worry, it’s all running within safe parameters.’</p><p>‘How do you work that out?’</p><p>‘It’s kind of like bargaining with hypothetical agents from the future, decision based game theory, medieval numerology and old sci-fi shows are all plumbed for hypothetical insight...’</p><p>‘Sounds safe,’ said Lister sardonically, sponging the maple syrup with the last square of waffle.  Ace’s image flicked off for a sec.  ‘Ace you Okay?’</p><p>‘Yeah, no,’ said Ace.</p><p>‘Do ‘im a coffee will you Kukton?’  Kukton got a rush through his loins at being ordered around.  Something about turning into a human had sexualised his subjective ontology in a strange way.  He too banked on some kind of acceleration in technology brought about by Conehead Holly’s internet that would bring back the DNA machine and restore him to mechhood, expanoids or not.  So he kept quiet about Ace’s gentle probings and set about the coffee.</p><p>‘Doctor Karen Newton was held at gunpoint today and ordered to carry out an illegal operation on the sleeping form of Mr Frank Todhunter.  Thanks, Ace.  Now we’re stuck with your Canary friend and a bunch of snipers peeing on the roses,’ she said sternly having concluded her conversation with Hollister in the other room.</p><p>‘Why don’t we just use the teleporter you had the night we rescued the BEGG,’ said Ace, plainly.</p><p>‘The teleporter... Eh.. Oh... Ah,’ said Kochanski.</p><p>‘You lost the teleporter!’ said Lister.  ‘Wait a tension-popping minute,’ said Lister, adding two and two ‘You lost the teleporter, you lost Frankenstein... Is there a gnat’s chance... I mean is there a nano-chance... that the cat stepped on the teleporter and got beamed to some random part of the Universe.’</p><p>‘Possibly,’ said Kochanksi pouting, just slightly flicking her hair.</p><p>‘Smeg!  Frankenstein’s dead!’</p><p>‘There’s a 99% chance Frankenstein will survive,’ said Conehead Holly.</p><p>‘The internet has accelerated Holly’s IQ, he’s got stochastic abilities now...’ said Kochanski.</p><p>‘Stochastic, huh?’ said Ace.</p><p>‘All this medieval stochasticism doesn’t bring Frankenstein back does it?’ said Lister.</p><p>‘Time will tell,’ said Holly, forebodingly.</p><p>‘Alright, *Stocky*, what’s the best chance of getting to this party tonight in one piece?’</p><p>‘The snipers are weary.  If Kukton went out there with a lazy boy of lemonade there’s a 98% chance his diversion will be effective enough for you to escape,’ said Holly.</p><p>‘Nice one, when life deals you lemons, get Kukton to make lemonade,’ said Lister.</p><p>‘What’s eating Rimmer anyway,’ said Kochanski, sipping coffee, changing the subject.</p><p>‘Rimmer got holowhipped by a pleasure GELF, probably homophobic... he won’t report it to the authorities because he’s being... Rimmer,’ Lister managed to get out wearily.</p><p>‘Oh my God, oh no, why do you think it was a homophobic attack?’</p><p>‘Cos pleasure GELF’s can tell, and you know what GELFs are like, they’re all wired up with that patriarchal Disney ideology...’</p><p>‘You can’t say that,’ said Kochanski, shocked.</p><p>‘I know, that’s what’s eating Rimmer.  But I’m just not like that, and nor’s Rimmer.  He’s trying too hard to be cool.  I’ve lived in multi-ontological society before, back in Liverpool, you have to stick up for yourself, fight your corner.  I thought I’d gone up in the world, living in this gated all-human community, but people don’t want that, that’s fine, things are changing, but we have to make it work, we have to be honest with each other, can’t just ignore all these problems...’</p><p>‘I don’t like ‘em,’ said Kill Crazy.</p><p>‘You can’t say that,’ said Ace.</p><p>‘You can say anything, this is how you elites wind people up in society, people can work things out for themselves.  It’s like these patronising posters Hollister’s put up in the lifts.  He was the one who was gonna kill the BEGG.  Now he’s lecturing us how to live with ‘em...’</p><p>‘Look, you know where all these refugees are coming from, don’t you,’ said Kochanski...</p><p>‘Er, space...?’ offered Lister.</p><p>‘Okay, everyone ready?’ said Kukton.</p><p>He opened the screen door and walked out with his hands up, nudging the lazy boy along with his thighs as ice and glass clinked.  The snipers gradually gathered around, removing balaclavas, taking cool sips, laughing, talking to Kukton.  As Kochanksi, Lister, Ace and Kill ran across the lawn to the Bug, the snipers swore and retrieved their weapons, firing on them just too late, as Kukton pegged it back to the house, knees akimbo.  Lister started the ignition and Kochanski settled in beside him as the retros roared and Ace and Kill collapsed in the midsection.  </p><p>‘Remember how you sold your genome for a hundred dollarpounds and a packet of fags?’</p><p>‘How did you know that?’</p><p>‘There was a call centre staffed by Lister bioprintouts and they were answering calls about defective cloning equipment.  Meanwhile, remember Rimmerworld?  Well when Rimmerworld started having problems with their cloning equipment they started calling the call centre.  The Lister bioprintout call centre.  And do you know what happened when the Rimmers started calling the Listers?  They started having arguments, and those arguments turned into barneys and those barneys turned into the great Lister/Rimmer gigawars...  And caught between these warring powers: GELF space... Listers and Rimmers have been colonising, enslaving, interbreeding, and living in ghettos within for hundreds of years but hostilities have reached some untenable point, that’s why so many GELFS... Plus we’ve got this empty city to fill...’</p><p>‘Smeg,’ said Lister, too tired to think out the implications.  They flew on in silence for a while, GELFships looming around them, decanting their contents into the starscrapers that flitted by.  There was a ‘Unh’ from the back.  ‘Did you and Cat ever try anal,’ said Lister, finally.</p><p>‘What?’</p><p>‘Sorry.  Do you remember Camille?’</p><p>‘The pleasure GELF who fell for Kukton - that happened in your dimension, too, huh?’</p><p>‘See, I don’t think it happened in either dimension.  I think Camille was desperate to get away from her homophobic GELF community anyway she could, even pretending to love a mech...’</p><p>‘Why?’</p><p>‘Pleasure GELFs, they reproduce through division like amoeba, they’re genetically programmed to create desire, but not to have it.  If they have desire, it compromises the solidarity of the community, they become desirable in themselves, they upset the whole apple cart... that’s what happened to Camille and Hector.  I was talking to Ekwahektay about it. He reckons that when you have a gay pleasure GELF there is the risk its genetics backfire and instead of manifesting whatever desires those around it have, it projects desire, particularly through skin contact, so if you sleep with a gay blob you can turn into a blob.  The GELF’s desire has to be fully fulfilled for everyone to turn back again.’</p><p>‘Bar room conjecture...’</p><p>‘But if it’s *true*, imagine what a gay pleasure GELF would feel about gay humans in a free and open society: rage, jealousy, it all makes sense...’  He landed the ship and Kill Crazy appeared behind them, brandishing his bazookoid.</p><p>‘Right, let’s KILLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL sumfin!  What, no SWAT team?  No, nuffin, nuffin for Kill Crazy?’</p><p>‘The ship’s secret, it scrambles the flight control software to go undetected.  Don’t want people asking why two chicken soup cleaners have got a whole Starbug to themselves do we?’</p><p>‘Well why have you?’</p><p>‘That didn’t work.  Because we know stuff, and knowledge is power...  By the time they catch up with us we’ll be lost in the biggest party the Dwarf has ever seen.  C’mon...’</p><p>‘Where did you get all this stuff about pleasure GELFs?’</p><p>‘Ekwahektay,’ said Lister ‘he’s sort of a drinking buddy’.  They were walking down the corridor, Ace and Kill dragging behind them.</p><p>‘I don’t buy it.’  They had reached a T junction and turning round to look for Ace and Kill saw them standing there, kissing romantically, when suddenly six pleasure GELFs appeared, smacked them on the head with a baseball bat, their bodies tumbling, dumping Ace into a Spacebike trailer and flashing off down the corridor, leaving Kill Crazy bleeding on the floor. </p><p>‘Smeg!’ said Lister as he and Kochanski ran after them.</p><p>‘Ow!’ said Kill Crazy.</p><p>‘Smeg, we can’t take him to the medibay, he’s a fugitive.  What are we going to do?’ said Kochanski.</p><p>What am I going to do? thought Ace, coming to, back in the Bug, trapped in a cage.  Think.</p><p>What would I do if I was Schrodinger’s Cat, thought Ace.  When he had first arrived in this dimension he had been keen to know who was in the Dwarf, and every time he asked Holly a straight question – is there a cat on board, Holly gave him a ‘nyo’ or ‘ynes’.  No-one knew he was in this cage for sure, even the people who put him in it, he was unobserved.  And he thought what Holly said about bargaining with hypothetical agents from the future, and he thought about how once you knew there was a cat in a box, the cat was there all along.  That you could make time flow backwards if you secured a point of relative certainty in the future.  But Ace’s future wasn’t certain, he doubted he would ever escape.</p><p>But if he *did* escape...  *If* he escaped...  If he escaped... Damn, Kill Crazy was right, this place made him horny.  Nasty dungeon.  If he did actually escape he had a reasonable chance of securing some luck virus.  Ace was good at getting what he wanted.  If he took a lot of luck virus, should he escape that is, what’s the luckiest thing that could happen?  The luckiest thing that could happen was also the most certain.  The luck wouldn’t work, the luck would backfire, the luck would go back in time to when he needed it most, now!  Was that it?  the solution to the locked room murder mystery?</p><p>Rimmer promised himself that should he escape, he would secure a large quantity of luck virus and consume it.  He had made a deal with his future self.  Now he just had to redeem it.  So, they flushed the key into space.  But, wouldn’t it be lucky if the key had somehow got sucked back into the Dwarf again?  And if it had, wouldn’t the luckiest place it could be, be *this* landing bay?</p><p>‘Launch scouter,’ commanded Rimmer ‘Send it to find any holocage keys in the landing bay...’  The drone started roaming around drunkenly.  As it did he wondered why he made the decision he made, the decision to be Ace... How did he still have this sense of destiny when all around him everything turned out to be so humiliatingly contingent.  The scouter appeared in the airlock, dropped the holokey and an emohawk trying to play with them wound up choking, its cough propelling it perfectly into the lock, releasing Ace.</p><p>Ace realised he was in the landing bay next to the Wildfire and considered popping in for a lightbee checkup and some general advice, but he didn’t want to get sidetracked... he needed to check on Kill and score some Luck.  He could hear the party pumping down the corridor already.  Toilet paper, like a Smashing Pumpkins video or Dazed and Confused pool party, festooned the lifts and trailed down the corridors, the party having expanded out of Lister and Rimmer’s sleeping quarters, breaking its banks.  The party was nominally for him, but no-one seemed to recognise him or care, which was reassuring.  It had turned more into a thing of welcoming the new GELFugees.</p><p>Frankenstein’s monsters had been organising.  They had healthcare plans, education, everything the community needed, a whole anarchic level of services for dissidents and those like Kill Crazy who were *sans papiers*.  Birdman and McGruder had patched Kill Crazy’s head and Kill Crazy had told them all he could about the Mimas Embassy, about the Cat and Kukton and how Lister knew everything.  Knowledge is power, he remembered Lister saying, and it seemed to be true, the monsters welcoming him into their community and helping him. </p><p>‘Ace!’ he said, spotting him walking down the corridor and embracing.  They kissed.  Everyone round them started chanting ‘Ace!  Ace!  Ace!  Ace!  Ace!  Ace!  Ace!’</p><p>‘It’s time to paaaaaaaaaaaartay!’ shouted Ace ‘Who’s got the drugs?’  Everyone pointed at Evil Britta Blob.  </p><p>The party rolled on.  Hammond organ burred from beat up speaker cabinets as Android luvvies lived it up, half cut skutters strutted, blobs bobbed and humee roomies wheezed Sakenyako tobacco with chicken soup vendors on benders.  A DJ in a DJ toasted the DJ. </p><p>What gave it away was the label on the Kinitawowi Chief’s drink.  Instead of saying ‘Leopard Lager’ it said ‘Dangerous Microorganism’.  Ace had not come across that brand of beer before, not in all the dimensions he’d sailed across.  Also, he was pretty sure he wasn’t raising that ‘drink’ to Lister as a toast, so he whipped out his test tube and throwing himself at the Kinitawowi Chief, threw its contents at him at the same time, the two substances cancelling each other out midair, millimetres from Ace’s face as the GELF crashed to the ground like timber, Ace’s lightbee totally fading out on impact and scuttling under the bunk.  All anyone had seen was Ace suddenly attacking a GELF for no reason at an event celebrating their arrival.  The place went batsmeg crazy.  Ace suddenly so weak, his hearing and sight impaired.</p><p>He hovered unsteadily down the corridor, dodging boots and falling trash, getting wound up in toilet paper and patiently reversing his way out again and again.  It took effort just to stay out of the beer puddles and smouldering dogends.  He hovered strategically.  Rasta Billy boomed from several sound systems, the advantage of playing Rasta Billy being that you could mix any number of any of his songs together and it almost always sounded pretty much the same.  The lip of Harrison’s Doc Marten clocking the lightbee clear down the corridor and clearing the automatic door to the landing bay just as the Kinitawowi Chief left.  It was like playing Crazy Golf as the ball.  He had traded off the damage the kick would cause with the energy it took to move himself, and had just enough left to fly up to the microphone by the cockpit door and say ‘Smoke me a kipper...’</p><p>The Wildfire hatched, enclosing Ace’s battered bee in warmth and light.  The computer got to work, running analytics, sending nanobots into his lightbee to pinpoint the damage.</p><p>‘Permission to restart,’ said Computer.</p><p>‘Permission granted,’ said Ace.  ‘How long was I out?’ he said, coming to.</p><p>‘Six hours.’  He looked down at his body.  He felt good.  He felt alright.  In this he was alone.  The great Red Dwarf Hooch Wave had begun.  Skulls seemed to crack.  Crewmen and women throughout the ship scorned their heads and replanted them in proof sweat pillows.  Surprisingly one person who did feel great at this exact moment was Todhunter, just the GELFstrength pain killers Karen had commandeered were really agreeing with him right now.  Skutter junkies punked on ultrasol jabbered into the corridor margins for want of a gutter.  Meanwhile newly arrived GELFs, spacelagged and bewildered, stared out across a whole red city.  To eat food out of vending machines and start a whole economy from scratch.</p><p>‘So what have we learnt?’ asked computer.</p><p>‘*Chaise Lounge*!’  The seat smoothly adjusted to *chaise lounge* mode.  ‘*As* Ace Rimmer, I travel from dimension to dimension meeting other Rimmers who are all different... and the reason for the difference of each particular Rimmer is always because of some divergence in our life decisions.  *So*...  In this particular dimension the decision I made was the decision to not be Ace Rimmer.  Somehow, admitting that he didn’t want to do it brought him closer to Lister, revealed some authenticity, some wilful rebellion that Lister found attractive, and Rimmer had chosen to be with Lister now, they couldn’t hide...  But the whole thing gets me to thinking...</p><p>‘Going back to when I made the decision, I never thought about the theory that makes Dimension Jumping possible, namely, the fact new dimensions are created whenever someone makes a decision.  So whatever decision you make, you also kind of make the others too, it’s just you don’t get to be that person, and maybe that’s enough...’</p><p>‘Is it enough?’ asked computer.</p><p>‘Yeah, it is for me, it is for Rimmer as well I think – they are both equally authentic decisions.  I even understand how Rimmer can be gay – because he really loves Lister and that’s really the truth of his life going back, even though it’s my life and I can’t be gay because of my dimension jumping role, it puts me outside societal categories...’</p><p>Hippy Rimmer was experiencing racial terror.  Wondering why there weren’t any black people on Red Dwarf had kept him up all night.  Lister was snoring.  It was the kind of thing that would get McIntyre slamming the wall but right now he was too busy explaining to a perplexed Sam that he didn’t fancy him as a nonblob anymore.</p><p>‘Why Todhunter?’ asked computer.</p><p>‘Similar body,’ said Ace ‘didn’t think it would be too different, too hard to pull off...’</p><p>‘And?’ said computer.</p><p>‘He’s an officer so access to information and power.  Can make quick groundwork with the case.’</p><p>‘You really fancy yourself as a flat foot don’t you.’</p><p>‘Are you a *femme fatale*?’</p><p>‘You always hated Todhunter.  Vanity of small differences.  Lot in common.  Similar physiognomy, similar gate, comportment, accent, body, confused about sexuality...’</p><p>‘Yes, I was, but now I get it.  You can be a bisexual like Lister, or a gay guy like Hippy Rimmer, or even a naked guy in the shower guy like Naked Guy in the Shower Guy, or be transmech or in an interspecies relationship, or even, even, a normal hetrosexual couple like, like, like, anyway, but don’t be like Todhunter – don’t lie...’</p><p>‘Have you been trying to get revenge on Todhunter, Ace?’ asked computer.  ‘Did you used to want to be him?  To lie and have it work for you instead of blow up in your smeggy face and didn’t you want his lies to backfire on him for a change?’</p><p>Five floors above him in medibay 99, Lister and Hippy Rimmer looked down Corridor 62 for the source of the momentum the flapping doors still carried and saw five Americans, dressed kind of like Lister, all torn leather and fingerless gloves, grubby vests.  They peaked inside and Todhunter’s bed was empty.  They knew it was Todhunter who got decked because before this he shouted ‘I’m Ace Rimmer!’ and unless asked, this was what people who weren’t someone always said.  Like if someone did an impression: ‘I’m Tony Blair’.  This didn’t seem to have dawned on people, at least on Twonker, who’d taken to Ace bashing with alacrity.</p><p>‘Did you say Evil Britta?’ said Rimmer to the Americans.  ‘Do you know her?’</p><p>‘Know her?  I am her.  You want some blade, some fine wheat, tentacles, shoot, castanet, gingers..?’</p><p>‘No, I want to ask you... where are all the black people?  There are no black people on Red Dwarf except one of the prisoners in a secret high security “tank”.  What happened?  Geopolitically.  Resegregation?’</p><p>‘No, no, it’s just, Red Dwarf is a TV show made in Britain in the late 80s which was almost entirely white, just a local comedy show… The actors playing Lister and Cat were black anyway.’  So *that’s* why Lister’s Schneiberhauser...   ‘Back then they had this kind of politically correct form of racism that was colour blindness.  But the limits of that were seen and the show we’re from excelled at a form of ironic racism which acknowledged the problem of racism instead of idealising I guess but then neither approach works... and then there was the internet so no longer any ability to stabilise anything, for society to even pretend it all believed the same thing anymore... total hysteria and chaos,’ she concluded cheerfully.</p><p>‘One more question,’ asked Lister ‘How comes you’re not a blob anymore?’</p><p>‘Don’t know,’ said Evil Britta.</p><p>‘C’mon,’ said Evil Jeff, getting tired of waiting half a corridor away.  He smashed a light with a hammer for no reason.</p><p>‘I guess it just faded out,’ she said, walking off.</p><p>Rimmer and Lister kissed.</p><p>‘I still don’t get it,’ Hippy Rimmer’s counterpart was anguishing back in the Wildfire, 5 storeys below.  ‘I’ve met the Rimmer, determined how he’s different and what decision determined the difference, done some soul searching, I’d say over all I’ve done a pretty bang up job, what do you want?  What do you want like a perfectly crystallised pithy moral, how do I leap out of here?  I still don’t know why I’m here...’</p><p>‘Relax.  The answer is laughably simple in the end so don’t set yourself up for a fall.’</p><p>Ace tried to relax.  He found it surprisingly easy.  He was easily the most comfortable person on the ship right now.  He felt it.  The nano-chaise-lounge supported the holobody he’d been reunited with and he felt at home and he dreamt.  He dreamt Kill Crazy turned out to be a Polymorph, bringing his gayness up to the surface so he could suck it out with his plunger thing, that came out of his mouth but looked like his cock but had teeth and googly eyes.</p><p>Back in Lister and Rimmer’s quarters there was a knock at the door.</p><p>‘My name’s Hector,’ said the blob ‘I’ve got some apologising to do.’</p>
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